but the thing has always been, and especially it always was in the older West, where bold surmise of the whence and whither of life often defied the authority of Faith, then much more imperative than now. Reed's favorite author, whom he read as critically as if he were not his favorite, was Shakespeare; but his far more constant reading was the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I could not say why he read it so much, but he may have felt in it the mystical power which commands the imagination of men and holds them in respectful contemplation of a self-sufficing theory of the universe such as nothing in science or philosophy affords. He quoted it for a peculiar joy in the fitness of its application to every circumstance; he quoted Dickens, as everybody did then; he quoted Shakespeare a great deal more both in his talking and in his writing; and later in his life, long after mine had parted from it, he amused the spare moments of his journalistic leisure by a study of Shakespeare's women whom he did not take at the generally accepted critical appraisement. I am tempted out of the order of these confessions to follow him to the end which death put to the long kindness between us, and I recall with tenderness our last meeting near New York where he was hesitating whether to continue on his way to Europe. He had at last given up his work in Cincinnati where he had spent the many years after the few years we spent together in Columbus. He owned that he had worn himself out in that work, toiling incessantly through many homicidal Cincinnati summers, and he blamed himself for the sacrifice. He felt that he had turned from it too late; and in fact he died at sea soon after. He accepted his impending doom with the stoical calm which he always kept, and which I had once seen him keep so wonderfully after the war began, when a Southern Unionist, the formerly famous, now forgotten Parson Brownlow of Tennessee, came to reproach him for the part which he held that such writing as Reed's had borne in bringing on the strife. Reed suffered the good man's passion almost with compassion, and when Brownlow was gone he would not let me blame him, but said that he had played a noble part in the struggle to hold his region in the Union. He always kept a countenance of bland calm, lit by pale-blue eyes which gave no hint of the feeling within, and if I had not loved him so much and known him so well I might have thought the habitual smile of his clean-shaven lip sometimes a little cruel. He let his full soft beard grow inordinately long, and he had a way of stroking it as he slightly smiled and crisply spoke; it was the only touch of quaintness in him at a time when beards were self-indulgently worn in many fantastic ways. He was the best-dressed man I knew, in fashions as little aged as possible in their transition from the East to the West, and he was of a carefulness in such minor morals as gloves and boots very uncommon in our somewhat slovenly ways.