re exceedingly drastic. He
went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man
who is brooding over some impending disaster, and I conjectured
vainly as to what it might be. Though he was seemingly entirely idle
during the few days I knew him, his manner indicated that he was in
the throes of work that told terribly on his nerves. His eyes I
remember as the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of
lustre and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always
lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning
themselves out.

As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward, his head
low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the sheets of copy
paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting to be on the
track. Always, as he came and went about the halls, he seemed like a
man preparing for a sudden departure. Now that he is dead it occurs
to me that all his life was a preparation for sudden departure. I
remember once when he was writing a letter he stopped and asked me
about the spelling of a word, saying carelessly, "I haven't time to
learn to spell."

Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absent-minded
smile, "I haven't time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out
of a fellow's life."

He said he was poor, and he certainly looked it, but four years
later when he was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary ever paid a
newspaper correspondent, he clung to this same untidy manner of
dress, and his ragged overalls and buttonless shirt were eyesores to
the immaculate Mr. Davis, in his spotless linen and neat khaki
uniform, with his Gibson chin always freshly shaven. When I first
heard of his serious illness, his old throat trouble aggravated into
consumption by his reckless exposure in Cuba, I recalled a passage
from Maeterlinck's essay, "The Pre-Destined," on those doomed to
early death: "As children, life seems nearer to them than to other
children. They appear to know nothing, and yet there is in their
eyes so profound a certainty that we feel they must know all.--In
all haste, but wisely and with minute care do they prepare
themselves to live, and this very haste is a sign upon which mothers
can scarce bring themselves to look." I remembered, too, the young
man's melancholy and his tenseness, his burning eyes, and his way of
slurring over the less important things, as one whose time is short.

I have heard other people say how difficult it was t