ood, practically from babyhood, and that never, during
all our lives together, did a change occur in our relationship. He has
told me many things of a nature imparted by one man to another very
rarely, and only when each of the two feels that they are very close
together in that which sometimes makes two men as one. He was proud
and glad when he told me these things--they were but episodes, and
often trivial ones--and I was interested deeply. They added the
details of a history much of which I knew and part of which I had
guessed at.

He was not quite the ordinary man, this Grant Harlson, close friend of
mine. He had an individuality, and his name is familiar to many people
in the world. He has been looked upon by the tactful as but one of a
type in a new nationality--a type with traits not yet clearly defined,
a type not large, nor yet, thank God, uncommon--one of the best of the
type; to me, the best. A close friend perhaps is blind. No; he is not
that: he but sees so clearly that the world, with poorer view, may not
always agree with him.

I hardly know how to describe this same Grant Harlson. At this stage
of my story it is scarcely requisite that I should, but the account is
loose and vagrant and with no chronology. Physically, he was more than
most men, six feet in height, deep of chest, broad-shouldered,
strong-legged and strong-featured, and ever in good health, so far as
all goes, save the temporary tax on recklessness nature so often
levies, and the other irregular tax she levies by some swoop of the
bacilli of which the doctors talk so much and know so little. I mean
only that he might catch a fever with a chill addition if he lay
carelessly in some miasmatic swamp on some hunting expedition, or that,
in time of cholera, he might have, like other men, to struggle with the
enemy. But he tossed off most things lightly, and had that vitality
which is of heredity, not built up with a single generation, though
sometimes lost in one. Forest and farm-bred, college-bred,
city-fostered and broadened and hardened. A man of the world, with
experiences, and in his quality, no doubt, the logical, inevitable
result of such experiences--one with a conscience flexile and seeking,
but hard as rock when once satisfied. One who never, intentionally,
injured a human being, save for equity's sake. One who, of course,
wandered in looking for what was, to him, the right, but who, having
once determined, was ever st