In the early days of our acquaintanceship I used to try, by facial contortions and parenthetic gesture, to indicate my paltry disagreement with his political and social creed. Perhaps I came near at that time to inclusion in the “Damfool” category; but the nearness of my house, his generosity in overlooking the preliminary marks of my idiocy, and (deciding factor) the inappeasable craving for company which is his only means of expression, influenced him to give me another and yet another chance. He took to putting up the barrage at the least sign of my disapproval, and so converted me--outwardly. While I am with him I relax myself. I stare at him and wonder. I sometimes find myself wishing that I could be like him! It was, indeed, the thought of so impossible and outrageous an ambition that prompted me to attempt this portrait of him. I have failed, I know, to convey his proper quality. Anyone who has never met my friend will find nothing but the echo and shadow of him in this sketch. But is there anyone who has not met him or some member of his family? Down here I associate him with the land, but he has business interests connected with the Stock Exchange. And he has brothers, uncles and sons--any number of them--all of the same virtue. They are in the Army, the Law, Medicine, in the Pulpit, in Trade, in the House--in everything. They are all successful, and they have all given their services with immense vigour and volubility to the great task that my friend defines as “downing the Hun.” They are all men of action, and their thinking is done by a method as simple as simple addition. A few sterling principles are taken for granted, principles that can be applied in such phrases as “the good of the country,” “playing the game,” “Rome was not built in a day,” or “what I go by is facts,” and from these elementary premisses any and every argument can be deduced by the two-plus-two method. It is the apotheosis and triumph of a priorism. They do not believe in induction, and what they do not believe in does not exist for them. Their strength is in loudness and confidence, and they are very strong. Nevertheless, puzzling over my friend and his family in my own hair-splitting way, I have been wondering if this loudness is not a sign that the family has lost something of its old power? Their ancestors, also, were men of simple ideas and strong passions, men of inflexible purpose. But they were not, so far as one can judge from history, so blatantly loud. They bear the same kind of relation to my friend that Lincoln does to Roosevelt.