How he lived when out of office was the subject of unflattering conjecture. Many thought him the stipendiary of Mr. Mackay, the multimillionaire, with whom he was intimate, who told me he could never induce Tom to take money except for service rendered. Among his familiars was Colonel North, the English money magnate, who said the same thing. He had a widowed sister in Texas to whom he regularly sent an income sufficient for herself and family. And when he died, to the surprise of every one, he left his sister quite an accumulation. He had never been wholly a spendthrift. Though he lived well at Chamberlin’s in Washington and the Waldorf in New York he was careful of his credit and his money. I dare say he was not unfortunate in the stock market. He never married and when he died, still a youngish man as modern ages go, all sorts of stories were told of him, and the space writers, having a congenial subject, disported themselves voluminously. Inevitably most of their stories were apocryphal. I wonder shall we ever get any real truth out of what is called history? There are so many sides to it and such a confusing din of voices. How much does old Sam Johnson owe of the fine figure he cuts to Boswell, and, minus Boswell, how much would be left of him? For nearly a century the Empress Josephine was pictured as the effigy of the faithful and suffering wife sacrificed upon the altar of unprincipled and selfish ambition—lovelorn, deserted, heartbroken. It was Napoleon, not Josephine, except in her pride, who suffered. Who shall tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about Hamilton; about Burr; about Cæsar, Caligula and Cleopatra? Did Washington, when he was angry, swear like a trooper? What was the matter with Nero? IV One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs Elysées when he said: “There is a new coon—a literary coon—come to town. He is a Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson.” Then he told me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was living in a kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we known this we could have ended the poor fellow’s struggle with his pride and ambition then and there; have put him in the way of sure work and plenty of it; perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened, his days, unless it be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he may easily be conceived to have been from reading his wayward biography and voluminous correspondence. To a young Kentuckian, one of “my boys,” was given the opportunity to see the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had taken himself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained some measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in the consciousness of the achievement.