Bierce lived many years in Washington before making a visit to his old home. That happened in 1910, in which year he visited me at Carmel, and we afterwards camped for several weeks together with his brother and nephew, in Yosemite. I grew to know him better in those days, and he found us hospitable, in the main degree, to his view of things, socialism being the only issue on which we were not in accord. It led to many warm arguments, which, as usual, conduced nowhere but to the suspicion that truth in such matters was mainly a question of taste. I saw him again in the summer of 1911, which he spent at Sag Harbor. We were much on the water, guests of my uncle in his power-yacht "La Mascotte II." He was a devotee of canoeing, and made many trips on the warm and shallow bays of eastern Long Island, which he seemed to prefer to the less spacious reaches of the Potomac. He revisited California in the fall of the next year, a trip on which we saw him for the last time. An excursion to the Grand Canyon was occasionally proposed, but nothing came of it, nor did he consent to be again my guest at Carmel, on the rather surprising excuse that the village contained too many anarchists! And in November, 1913, I received my last letter from him, he being then in Laredo, Texas, about to cross the border into warring Mexico. Why he should have gone forth on so hazardous an enterprise is for the most part a matter of conjecture. It may have been in the spirit of adventure, or out of boredom, or he may not, even, have been jesting when he wrote to an intimate friend that, ashamed of having lived so long, and not caring to end his life by his own hand, he was going across the border and let the Mexicans perform for him that service. But he wrote to others that he purposed to extend his pilgrimage as far as South America, to cross the Andes, and return to New York by way of a steamer from Buenos Ayres. At any rate, we know, from letters written during the winter months, that he had unofficially attached himself to a section of Villa's army, even taking an active part in the fighting. He was heard from until the close of 1913; after that date the mist closes in upon his trail, and we are left to surmise what we may. Many rumors as to his fate have come out of Mexico, one of them even placing him in the trenches of Flanders. These rumors have been, so far as possible, investigated: all end in nothing. The only one that seems in the least degree illuminative is the tale brought by a veteran reporter from the City of Mexico, and published in the San Francisco _BULLETIN_. It is the story of a soldier in Villa's army, one of a detachment that captured, near the village of Icamole, an ammunition train of the Carranzistas. One of the prisoners was a sturdy, white-haired, ruddy-faced Gringo, who, according to the tale, went before the firing squad with an Indian muleteer, as sole companion in misfortune. The description of the manner--indifferent,