takes forever," he remarked. I distinctly
remember the illustration, for it rather took hold of me.

I have often been astonished since to hear Crane spoken of as "the
reporter in fiction," for the reportorial faculty of superficial
reception and quick transference was what he conspicuously lacked.
His first newspaper account of his shipwreck on the filibuster
"Commodore" off the Florida coast was as lifeless as the "copy" of a
police court reporter. It was many months afterwards that the
literary product of his terrible experience appeared in that
marvellous sea story "The Open Boat," unsurpassed in its vividness
and constructive perfection.

At the close of our long conversation that night, when the copy boy
came in to take me home, I suggested to Crane that in ten years he
would probably laugh at all his temporary discomfort. Again his body
took on that strenuous tension and he clenched his hands, saying, "I
can't wait ten years, I haven't time."

The ten years are not up yet, and he has done his work and gathered
his reward and gone. Was ever so much experience and achievement
crowded into so short a space of time? A great man dead at
twenty-nine! That would have puzzled the ancients. Edward Garnett
wrote of him in The Academy of December 17, 1899: "I cannot remember
a parallel in the literary history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith,
Henry James, Mr. Howells and Tolstoy, were all learning their
expression at an age where Crane had achieved his and achieved it
triumphantly." He had the precocity of those doomed to die in youth.
I am convinced that when I met him he had a vague premonition of the
shortness of his working day, and in the heart of the man there was
that which said, "That thou doest, do quickly."

At twenty-one this son of an obscure New Jersey rector, with but a
scant reading knowledge of French and no training, had rivaled in
technique the foremost craftsmen of the Latin races. In the six
years since I met him, a stranded reporter, he stood in the firing
line during two wars, knew hairbreadth 'scapes on land and sea, and
established himself as the first writer of his time in the picturing
of episodic, fragmentary life. His friends have charged him with
fickleness, but he was a man who was in the preoccupation of haste.
He went from country to country, from man to man, absorbing all that
was in them for him. He had no time to look backward. He had no
leisure for _camaraderie_. He drank life to th