he wrote her the best
letter that he could write. That was the only habit he had. He was a
slave to it.

Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence. They threw
their arms about each other and rocked to and fro for a long time. And
it hadn't been a long absence at that. No ocean had been between them;
her heart had not been in her mouth with the thought that he was under
fire, or about to become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been
away upon a little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried
treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's skull and
a broken arrowhead, and R. H. D. had been absent from his mother for
nearly two hours and a half.

I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail to give
more than a few hints of what he was like. There isn't much more space
at my command, and there were so many sides to him that to touch upon
them all would fill a volume. There were the patriotism and the
Americanism, as much a part of him as the marrow of his bones, and from
which sprang all those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers:
those trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those
quixotic efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and dexterous
exposures of this and that, from an absolutely unexpected point of
view. He was a quickener of the public conscience. That people are
beginning to think tolerantly of preparedness, that a nation which at
one time looked yellow as a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White,
and Blue is owing in some measure to him.

R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He
thought that peace at the price which our country has been forced to
pay for it was infinitely worse. And he was one of those who have
gradually taught this country to see the matter in the same way.

I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the surface of
my subject. And that is a failure which I feel keenly but which was
inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to say of those deplorable
"personal interviews" which appear in the newspapers, and in which the
important person interviewed is made by the cub reporter to say things
which he never said, or thought, or dreamed of--"You can't expect a
fifteen-dollar-a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week brain."

There is, however, one question which I should attempt to answer. No
two men are alike. In what one salient thing did R. H. D. differ fro