y, I want to see."

"To whom are you referring?" I asked with mock dignity.

"To John Adair," he answered.

"Well," said I, "John Adair married my grandmother's sister and I can
put you in the way of getting whatever you require."

I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the Revels in the old
Sutherland-Delmonico days. Even earlier than that--in London and
Paris--an intimacy had been established between us. He married in
Cleveland, Ohio, and many years passed before I came up with him again.
One day in Whitelaw Reid's den in the Tribune Building he reappeared,
strangely changed--no longer the rosy-cheeked, buoyant boy--an
overserious, prematurely old man. I was shocked, and when he had gone
Reid, observing this, said: "Oh, Hay will come round all right. He is
just now in one of his moods. I picked him up in Piccadilly the other
day and by sheer force brought him over."

When we recall the story of Hay's life--one weird tragedy after another,
from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the
tragic end of two members of his immediate family--there rises in spite
of the grandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: "The pity of it!"

This is accentuated by Henry Adams' Education. Yet the silent courage
with which Hay met disaster after disaster must increase both the
sympathy and the respect of those who peruse the melancholy pages of
that vivid narrative. Toward the end, meeting him on a public occasion,
I said: "You work too hard--you are not looking well."

"I am dying," said he.

"Yes," I replied in the way of banter, "you are dying of fame and
fortune."

But I went no further. He was in no mood for the old verbal horseplay.

He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were still several years before
him. When he came from Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was
nigh. I did not see him--he was too ill to see any one--but Frank Mason
kept me advised from day to day, and when, a month or two later, having
reached home, the news came to us that he was dead we were nowise
surprised, and almost consoled by the thought that rest had come at
last.

Frank Mason and his wife--"the Masons," they were commonly called, for
Mrs. Mason made a wondrous second to her husband--were from Cleveland,
Ohio, she a daughter of Judge Birchard--Jennie Birchard--he a rising
young journalist caught in the late seventies by the glitter of a
foreign appointment. They ran the gamut of the consular service,
beginni