he columns of a London
morning newspaper, since absorbed by the_ Daily News, _over articles
which, if my memory is not at fault, were mainly concerned with the
life of Thames side. They were written with extraordinary care. The man
who did them had, clearly, no competitor in Fleet Street. And he
furnishes a striking illustration of the chances and misfits of the
journalistic life. When, after some years of absence in the Far East, I
was able to fit a person to the writing which had so long attracted me,
I found H. M. Tomlinson on the regular reporting staff of a great
London newspaper. A man born for the creation of beauty in words was
doing daily turn along with the humble chronicler of metropolitan
trivialities._

_A year or two before the war the quality of his mind and of his style
was revealed in_ THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE--_a "narrative of the voyage of
the tramp steamer_ Capella, _from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and
thence two thousand miles along the forests of the Amazon and Madeira
Rivers to the San Antonio Falls," returning by Barbados, Jamaica, and
Tampa. Its author called it merely "an honest book of travel." It is
that no doubt; but in a degree so eminent, one is tempted to say that
an honest book of travel, when so conceived and executed, must surely
count among the noblest works of the literary artist._

_The great war provided almost unlimited work for men of letters, and
not seldom work that was almost as far from their ordinary business as
fighting itself. It carried Tomlinson into the guild of war
correspondents. In the early months he represented the paper to which
for some years he had been attached, the London_ Daily News. _Later,
under the co-operative scheme which emerged from the restrictive policy
adopted by all the belligerent governments, his dispatches came to be
shared among a partnership which included the London_ Times--_as odd an
arrangement for a man like Tomlinson as could well be imagined. It
would be foolish to attempt an estimate of his correspondence from
France. It was beautiful copy, but it was not war reporting. To those
of us who knew him it remained a marvel how he could do it at all. But
there was no marvel in the fact, attested by a notable variety of
witnesses, of Tomlinson as an influence and a memory, persisting until
the dispersal of the armies, as of one who was the friend of all, a
sweet and fine spirit moving untouched amid the ruin and terror,
expressing itself