In the autumn of 1905 the insurrectionary outbreaks in Russia were assuming such proportions that a serious revolutionary war was not improbable. Josiah secured a commission from a magazine to go to Russia and investigate the situation. His health was by no means good, and his temperate life in Oklahoma had had no permanently good effect upon his habits, but he set forth eagerly to do his work. He gathered much interesting material, and he wrote the required articles. He became very ill, however, and for a long time he lay at the point of death in a German hospital. When he returned to America for the last time, in the first warm days of 1906, he was broken, changed in his looks, a feeble shadow of himself. He told me then that, while he was so near death in Germany, the two thoughts that did more than anything else to get him on his feet again were his desire to see his mother and his determination to "make good" with his articles, which were not completed until his partial convalescence had begun. I had helped to get him that Russian commission, and it seemed to be ever in his mind that, since I had "stood for him"--that was the way he put it--he must not fail. From his bed of pain he dragged himself to "make good." Loyalty such as that was one of his strongest traits. I remember that once, while he was living in the Catskills, a distant relative sent a request for some money to help him out of a difficulty. Josiah came to New York by the first train he could get, and went to one of the savings banks in which he kept his funds. The relative received the money he needed. Before returning to Woodland Josiah told me of the errand which had brought him to New York. He added: "We must always stand by the family." It was late in 1906 that Flynt began his last task. He was sent to Chicago by the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ to "write up" pool-room gambling. Unable to give to this work the old energy of investigation, he was helped to a creditable showing by people who had the information he desired. He must have known that he was near the end. In every letter that he wrote to me during those last weeks he referred again and again to his having seen "mother," or his expectation of spending the next day with "mother," or of his plan to "make a short trip with mother." All his love centered more and more closely in her as death approached him, though, indeed, for years his chief thoughts had been of her. She was spending those last weeks in a suburb of Chicago, and he especially welcomed the work that took him to Chicago, because it made it possible for him to see her often. But when, about mid-January, 1907, he came down with pneumonia, he would not let his friends admit her to his room in the Chicago hotel. She was not to witness his suffering. He died at 7 P.M., on January 20, after two hours of unconsciousness. FOOTNOTES: