It is impossible to know how much of this came from his own actual seeing (for in his journey over the Oregon trail he had passed near the trail of the Vérendrye brothers) and how much came from those scraps of color and incident picked up in his blindness from varied sources; nor is it of consequence, except as it connotes something of the quality and character of his genius, for it is all accurate and the brave brothers Vérendrye move as living men across it. He was able to revivify a dusty document as well as a personal experience. "To him," as Mr. Barrett Wendell said out of an intimate acquaintance with him and his work, "a document of whatever kind,--a state paper, a Jesuit 'relation,' the diary of a provincial soldier, the record of a Yankee church,--was merely the symbol of a fact which had once been as real as his own hardships among the western Indians, or as the lifetime of physical suffering, which never bent his will." [Footnote: "Proceedings American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1893-4," 29:439.] I have never read "The Oregon Trail" with the same keen enthusiasm as his other books, largely, I think, because it is a mere report of personal adventure and not a composition fused of his imagination. It is an excellent photograph by the side of a master's painting. But all this accuracy of detail, this revivifying of dead Indians, knights, voyageurs and soldiers, this painting of prairie, forest, and mountain, was not in itself to put him among the world's great historians. And, indeed, there are those who, appreciating the artist's skill, have expressed regret that he gave this skill to no great theme. It is as if he were (they would doubtless say) writing of the labors of sacrificing missionaries in Africa, or of colonial administration in Indo-China, or of forest adventure along the Amazon. In the Boston Public Library I found that every work of his had duplicate copies in the boys' department. (And how great the reading is to this day is intimated by my inability one evening to get a copy of "Pontiac's War," though there were several copies in the possession of the library. A reserve had finally to be called in.) But I should say that this double classification intimated rather the genuine human interest of his story, appealing alike to men and to boys (as the greatest of human writings do)--a work "for all mankind and for all time."