ifteen hundred or two
thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not
gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that
stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs,
if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of
those incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to
revise this book.

Orion wrote his autobiography and sent it to me. But great was my
disappointment; and my vexation, too. In it he was constantly making a
hero of himself, exactly as I should have done and am doing now, and he
was constantly forgetting to put in the episodes which placed him in an
unheroic light. I knew several incidents of his life which were
distinctly and painfully unheroic, but when I came across them in his
autobiography they had changed color. They had turned themselves inside
out, and were things to be intemperately proud of. In my dissatisfaction
I destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography. But in what
remains there are passages which are interesting, and I shall quote from
them here and there and now and then, as I go along.

[Sidenote: (1898.)]

While we were living in Vienna in 1898 a cablegram came from Keokuk
announcing Orion's death. He was seventy-two years old. He had gone down
to the kitchen in the early hours of a bitter December morning; he had
built the fire, and had then sat down at a table to write something; and
there he died, with the pencil in his hand and resting against the paper
in the middle of an unfinished word--an indication that his release from
the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life
was mercifully swift and painless.

[_Dictated in 1904._] A quarter of a century ago I was visiting John Hay
at Whitelaw Reid's house in New York, which Hay was occupying for a few
months while Reid was absent on a holiday in Europe. Temporarily also,
Hay was editing Reid's paper, the New York "Tribune." I remember two
incidents of that Sunday visit particularly well. I had known John Hay a
good many years, I had known him when he was an obscure young editorial
writer on the "Tribune" in Horace Greely's time, earning three or four
times the salary he got, considering the high character of the work
which came from his pen. In those earlier days he was a picture to look
at, for beauty of feature, perfection of form and grace of carriage and
movement. He had a charm about him of a sort