o induce Crane
to talk seriously about his work, and I suspect that he was
particularly averse to discussions with literary men of wider
education and better equipment than himself, yet he seemed to feel
that this fuller culture was not for him. Perhaps the unreasoning
instinct which lies deep in the roots of our lives, and which guides
us all, told him that he had not time enough to acquire it.

Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to people whom
they think never to see again, more completely than they ever do to
their confreres. From the wise we hold back alike our folly and our
wisdom, and for the recipients of our deeper confidences we seldom
select our equals. The soul has no message for the friends with whom
we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we
play only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and
seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who
meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments too, when
the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation is necessary to
every man, if it be only to his valet or his gardener. At such a
moment, I was with Mr. Crane.

The hoped for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was on the
last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from the theatre and
was in the Journal office writing a notice of the play. It was
eleven o'clock when Crane came in. He had expected his money to
arrive on the night mail and it had not done so, and he was out of
sorts and deeply despondent. He sat down on the ledge of the open
window that faced on the street, and when I had finished my notice I
went over and took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on
my part, Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the
first throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the
master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that
are the curse of that country was blowing up from Kansas. The white,
western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us. The streets
were silent at that hour, and we could hear the gurgle of the
fountain in the Post Office square across the street, and the twang
of banjos from the lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the
colored waiters were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the
office were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder
clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade, Crane
never raised his voice;