ing as possible. I could but admire the temper he showed when
the principal building there was one night burned to ashes. There was
no insurance on it, and it would cost a couple of thousand dollars to
replace it. Excitable as Davidson was about small contrarieties, he
watched this fire without a syllable of impatience. _Plaie d'argent
n'est pas mortelle_, he seemed to say, and if he felt sharp regrets, he
disdained to express them.

No more did care about his literary reputation trouble him. In the
ordinary greedy sense, he seemed quite free from ambition. During his
last years he had prepared a large amount of material for that history
of the interaction of Greek, Christian, Hebrew, and Arabic thought upon
one another before the revival of learning, which was to be his _magnum
opus_. It was a territory to which, in its totality, few living minds
had access, and in which a certain proprietary feeling was natural.
Knowing how short his life might be, I once asked him whether he felt
no concern lest the work already done by him should be frustrate, from
the lack of its necessary complement, in case he were suddenly cut off.
His answer surprised me by its indifference. He would work as long as
he lived, he said, but not allow himself to worry, and look serenely at
whatever might be the outcome. This seemed to me uncommonly
high-minded. I think that Davidson's conviction of immortality had
much to do with such a superiority to accidents. On the surface, and
towards small things, he was irritable enough, but the undertone of his
character was remarkable for equanimity. He showed it in his final
illness, of which the misery was really atrocious. There were no
general complaints or lamentations about the personal situation or the
arrest to his career. It was the human lot and he must even bear it;
so he kept his mind upon objective matters.

But, as I said at the outset, the paramount thing in Davidson in my
eyes was his capacity for friendship. His friends were
innumerable--boys and girls and old boys and old girls, Papists and
Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, married and single; and he cared deeply
for each one of them, admiring them often too extravagantly. What term
can name those recurrent waves of delighted laughter that expressed his
greeting, beginning from the moment he saw you and accompanying his
words continuously, as if his pleasure in you were interminable? His
hand too, stretched out when yards