was in Japan in the
Japanese-Russian War, and in the Transvaal I missed him by a few days,
but in Vera Cruz I had many enjoyable opportunities of becoming well
acquainted with him.

The privilege was a pleasant one, for it served to dispel a
preconceived and not an entirely favorable impression of his character.
For years I had heard stories about Richard Harding Davis--stories
which emphasized an egotism and self-assertiveness which, if they ever
existed, had happily ceased to be obtrusive by the time I got to know
him.

He was a different Davis from the Davis whom I had expected to find;
and I can imagine no more charming and delightful companion than he was
in Vera Cruz. There was no evidence of those qualities which I feared
to find, and his attitude was one of unfailing kindness,
considerateness, and generosity.

In the many talks I had with him I was always struck by his evident
devotion to a fixed code of personal conduct. In his writings he was
the interpreter of chivalrous, well-bred youth, and his heroes were
young, clean-thinking college men, heroic big-game hunters, war
correspondents, and idealized men about town, who always did the noble
thing, disdaining the unworthy in act or motive. It seemed to me that
he was modelling his own life, perhaps unconsciously, after the favored
types which his imagination had created for his stories. In a certain
sense he was living a life of make believe, wherein he was the hero of
the story, and in which he was bound by his ideals always to act as he
would have the hero of his story act. It was a quality which only one
could have who had preserved a fresh youthfulness of outlook in spite
of the hardening processes of maturity.

His power of observation was extraordinarily keen, and he not only had
the rare gift of sensing the vital elements of a situation, but also
had, to an unrivalled degree, the ability to describe them vividly. I
don't know how many of those men at Vera Cruz tried to describe the
kaleidoscopic life of the city during the American occupation, but I
know that Davis's story was far and away the most faithful and
satisfying picture. The story was photographic, even to the sounds and
smells.

The last I saw of him in Vera Cruz was when, on the Utah, he steamed
past the flagship Wyoming, upon which I was quartered, and started for
New York. The Battenberg cup race had just been rowed, and the Utah
and Florida crews had tied. As the Utah was