Davis became a war correspondent and spent his time racing over the earth from one scene of excitement to another. I have run through the volume of his letters and jotted down a few date lines in the order they occur: Cuba, London, Egypt, Gibraltar, Paris, Central America, South America, Moscow, Budapest, Havana, London, Florence, Greece, Havana, Cape Town, Pretoria, Aix-les-Bains, Massachusetts, Madrid, London, San Francisco, Tokio, Manchuria, Havana, the Congo, New York, London, Santiago, Vera Cruz, Belgium, Plattsburg, Paris, Athens, Rome. If you know the history of the world for twenty-five years beginning with 1890 you can connect each of these geographical names with a coronation, a jubilee, a war, or other ruling-class recreation. All through the letters runs the theme of money, the Aladdin’s tale of a soldier of literary fortune. He gets five thousand dollars for the serial rights of “Soldiers of Fortune” from “Scribner’s Magazine”; he gets five hundred dollars for reporting a foot-ball game; he gets three thousand dollars and expenses for a month’s reporting of the Cuban struggle with Spain, and when America enters the conflict, he gets ten cents a word from “Scribner’s Magazine” and four hundred dollars a week and expenses from the New York “Times.” Everywhere he goes he is, of course, a lion, and moves only in the highest circles. His letters are full of diplomats and generals and lords and ladies and kings and queens, together with the most famous actors and literary lights. He is presented at Court--and by this, needless to say, I mean the Court of their Majesties the King and Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor and Empress of India. And all through the letters we note dinner-parties and banquets and champagne-suppers and cocktails--interrupted by a siege with sciatica, preparing us for the quick curtain, when our ruling-class hero departs his successful life at the age of fifty-two. New York is a place of mean and envious gossip, and one of its diversions was telling anecdotes illustrating the snobbery and self-importance of Richard Harding Davis. It appears that in the days of his extraordinary prosperity he did not always recognize his former newspaper cronies when he met them on the street. Perhaps he had noted that so many of these former cronies took the occasion to borrow money from him. Anyhow, I have one anecdote to contribute to the collection.