his work was overrated, he himself as I knew
him was as kind and brave as in Henley's verse to his memory.

Others of the same group, the writers' group, who flit across the scene
in my memory are less intimately associated with Henley. Harold Frederic
wrote for him occasionally--wrote few things, indeed, more amusing than
his _Observations in Philistia_, a satire first published in the
_National Observer_--but his chief business was the novel and the _New
York Times_ correspondence. He was an able man, something more than the
typical clever American journalist, a writer of books that deserve to be
remembered but that have hardly outlived him. He was an amusing
companion, the sort of man it was delightful to run across by chance in
unexpected places, for which reason my most agreeable recollections of
him are not in Buckingham Street but in the streets and _cafes_ of
Berlin and Vienna that summer he was studying Jews in Southeastern
Europe, and first knew there were Jews in Vienna when J., who afterwards
began to study them for himself, introduced him to the _Juden Gasse_. He
liked a good dinner, and gave us more than one, and he was an amusing
talker over it and also on our Thursday nights until he got to the stage
he always did get to of telling tales of his boyhood when he carried
milk to the big people in his part of the Mohawk Valley, was dazzled by
his first vision of Brussels carpet on their floors, and determined to
have Brussels carpet on his own before he was many years older, and I
can answer for it that, by the time I knew him, his house was all
Brussels carpet from top to bottom. They were most creditable tales and
entertaining too at a first hearing, but they staled, as all tales must,
with repetition.

S.R. Crockett never wrote anything for Henley. Henley would have been
outraged by the bare suggestion, and Crockett the writer was never
handled with the gloves by Henley's Young Men in the _National
Observer_. But with Crockett himself they had no quarrel. We all liked
him--a large red and white Scotchman, the Scots strong in every word he
spoke, hustling us all off for a fish dinner at Greenwich on the
strength of his first big cheque for royalties; or as happy to spend the
evening sitting on our floor and diverting William Penn with the ball of
paper on the end of a string that William never wearied of pursuing,
partly for his amusement, partly because, with his innate politeness, he
knew it contributed