arble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young athlete." He stood
six feet and over, straight as a Sioux chief, a noble and leonine
head carried by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a
child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He
was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but so
tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his adolescent days that
he could stand stiff-legged and lay his hands flat upon the floor.

The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at his door
you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly. He was hard at
work, doing unto others what others had done unto him. You were a
stranger to him; some magazine had accepted a story that you had written
and published it. R. H. D. had found something to like and admire in
that story (very little perhaps), and it was his duty and pleasure
to tell you so. If he had liked the story very much he would send
you instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had drawn
a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden promise in a half
column of unsigned print, R. H. D. would find you out, and find time to
praise you and help you. So it was that when he emerged from his room
at sharp eight o'clock, he was wide-awake and happy and hungry, and
whistled and double-shuffled with his feet, out of excessive energy, and
carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and letters and telegrams.

Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a sullen,
dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night before had rejoiced
in each other's society. With him it was the time when the mind is,
or ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest.
Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of
statesmen, laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.

Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's
work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free
conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a newspaper,
he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so much as a
wistful glance, and hurry to his workroom.

He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say, he
wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the delicious ease
and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily. He did and
h