l remarked in a musing tone, "What
fine humility, or rather modesty. I can't imagine any other man of
Howells' eminence taking that tone."

Kipling had just returned to America, and I went at once to call upon
him. I had not seen him since the dinner which he gave to Riley and me
in the early Nineties, and I was in doubt as to his attitude toward the
States. I found him in a very happy mood, surrounded by callers. In the
years of his absence the American public had learned to place a very
high value on his work and thousands of his readers were eager to do him
honor.

"They come in a perfect stream," he said, and there was a note of
surprise as well as of pleasure in his voice.

He inquired of Riley and Howells and other of our mutual friends, making
it plain that he held us all in his affections. I mention his youth, his
happiness, his joy with special emphasis for he was stricken with
pneumonia a few days later and came so near death that only the most
skillful nursing was able to bring him back to health. For two nights
his life was despaired of, and when he recovered consciousness it was
only to learn that one of his children had died while he himself was at
lowest ebb. It was a most tragic reversal of fortune but it had this
compensation, it called forth such a flood of sympathy on the part of
his public that the daily press carried hourly bulletins of his
conditions. It was as if a great ruler were in danger.

On Saturday the eleventh of February, I attended a meeting (the first
meeting) of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Charles Dudley
Warner presided, but Howells was the chief figure. Owen Wister, Robert
Underwood Johnson, Augustus Thomas and Bronson Howard took an active
part. Warner appointed Thomas and me as a committee to outline a
Constitution and By-laws, and I set down in my diary this comment, "Only
a few men were out and these few were chilled by a cold room but
nevertheless, this meeting is likely to have far-reaching
consequences."

In these months of my stay in New York I had a very busy and profitable
time with Howells, Burroughs, Stedman, Matthews, Herne and their like as
neighbors but after all, my home was in the West, and many times each
day my mind went back to my mother waiting in the snow-covered little
village thirteen hundred miles away. As I had established her in
Wisconsin to be near me, it seemed a little like desertion to be
spending the winter in the East.

My thoug