reck; the group of which he and I had once been a part;
his youthful and unsophisticated viewpoint at the time. "You know," he
confessed quite frankly finally, "my mother always told me then and
afterwards that I made a mistake in leaving you. You were the better
influence for me. She was right. I know it now. Still, a life's a life,
and we have to work through it and ourselves somehow."

I agreed heartily.

He told me of his wife, children, farm, his health and his difficulties.
It appeared that he was making a bare living at times, at others doing
very well. His great bane was the popular magazine, the difficulty of
selling a good thing. It was true, I said, and at midnight he left,
promising to come again, inviting me to come to his place in the country
at my convenience. I promised.

But one thing and another interfered. I went South. One day six months
later, after I had returned, he called up once more, saying he wished to
see me. Of course I asked him down and he came and spoke of his health.
Some doctor, an old college pal of his, was assuring him that he had
Bright's disease and that he might die at any time. He wanted to know,
in case anything happened to him, would I look after his many mss., most
of which, the most serious efforts at least, had never been published. I
agreed. Then he went away and I never saw him again. A year later I was
one day informed that he had died three days before of kidney trouble.
He had been West to see a moving-picture director; on his way East he
had been taken ill and had stopped off with friends somewhere to be
treated, or operated upon. A few weeks later he had returned to New
York, but refusing to rest and believing that he could not die, so soon,
had kept out of doors and in the city, until suddenly he did collapse.
Or, rather, he met his favorite doctor, an intellectual savage like
himself, who with some weird desire to appear forceful, definite,
unsentimental perhaps--a mental condition L---- most fancied--had told
him to go home and to bed, for he would be dead in forty-eight hours!--a
fine bit of assurance which perhaps as much as anything else assisted
L---- to die. At any rate and in spite of the ministrations of his wife,
who wished to defy the doctor and who in her hope for herself and her
children as well as him strove to contend against this gloom, he did so
go to bed and did die. On the last day, realizing no doubt how utterly
indifferent his life had been, ho