espondents--Dick Davis, Fred
Remington, John Fox, Caspar Whitney, and others--and it seems to me
that, while differing one from another as average men differ, they had
in common a kind of veteran superiority to trivial surprise, a tolerant
world wisdom that mere newspaper work in other departments does not
bring. At any rate, and however acquired, Dick Davis had the quality.
And with that seasoned calm he kept and cultivated the reporter sense.
He had insight--the faculty of going back of appearances. He saw the
potential salients in occurrences and easily separated them from the
commonplace--and the commonplace itself when it was informed by a
spirit that made it helpful did not mislead him by its plainness.

That is another war-correspondent quality. He saw when adherence to
duty approached the heroic. He knew the degree of pressure that gave
it test conditions and he had an unadulterated, plain, bread-and-water
appreciation of it.

I think that fact shows in his stories. He liked enthusiastically to
write of men doing men's work and doing it man fashion with
full-blooded optimism.

At his very best he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall. He had a
boy's undisciplined indifference to great personages not inconsistent
with his admiration of their medals. By temperament he was impulsive
and partisan, and if he was your friend you were right until you were
obviously very wrong. But he liked "good form," and had adopted the
Englishman's code of "things no fellow could do"--therefore his
impulsiveness was without offense and his partisanship was not
quarrelsome.

In the circumstance of this story of "Soldiers of Fortune" he could
himself have been either Clay or Stuart and he had the humor of
MacWilliams.

In the clash between Clay and Stuart, when Clay asks the younger man if
the poster smirching Stuart's relation to Madame Alvarez is true, it is
Davis talking through both men, and when, standing alone, Clay lifts
his hat and addresses the statue of General Bolivar, it is Davis at his
best.

Modern criticism has driven the soliloquy from the theatre, but modern
criticism in that respect is immature and wrong. The soliloquy exists.
Any one observing the number of business men who, talking aloud to
themselves, walk Fifth Avenue any evening may prove it. For Davis the
soliloquy was not courageous; it was simply true. And that was a place
for it.

When "Soldiers of Fortune" was printed it had a quick an