al
more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took
to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to
California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the
manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. I
reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's faith
in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail
instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the
press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief
absences. Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he
accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its
correspondent.

"Don't go, Keeler," I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his
intention. "They'll garrote you down there."

"Well," he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the
coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in a
fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, "that's what
Aldrich says, and he's agreed to write my biography, on condition that I
make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it,
'If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of
'Marjorie Daw and Other People,' I should not now be in this place.'"

He went, and he did not come back. He was not indeed garroted as his
friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by
which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was
never heard of again.

I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men
commonly do. If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no
longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some
chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept
itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully
trusted that "the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us." The faith
worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed,
and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere. He had
nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself
wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some
things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of
self-respect. He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any
discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in ch