Probably he had tried to help Ward in his hope, which was hardly a scheme, for that appropriation from the legislature for his "Simon Kenton." They always remained friends, and during Russell's stay in New York he probably saw more of Ward, so often sequestered with the horses for his equestrian groups, than most of his other friends. I who lived quarter of a century in the same city with him saw him seldom by that fault of social indolence, rather than indifference, which was always mine, and which grows upon one with the years. Once I went to dine with him in the little room off his great, yawning, equine studio, and to have him tell me of his life for use in a book of "Ohio Stories" I was writing; then some swift years afterward I heard casually from another friend that Ward was sick. "Would he be out soon?" I asked. "I don't think he'll be out at all," I was answered, and I went the next day to see him. He was lying with his fine head on the pillow still like such a head of Michelangelo as the Florentine might have modeled of himself, and he smiled and held out his hand, and had me sit down. We talked long of old times, of old friends and enemies (but not really enemies), and it was sweet to be with him so. He seemed so very like himself that it was hard to think him in danger, but he reminded us who were there that he was seventy-nine years old, and when we spoke about his getting well and soon being out again he smiled in the wisdom which the dying have from the world they are so near, and, tenderly patient of us, expressed his doubt. In a few days, before I could go again, I heard that he was dead. XI But in that winter of 1859-60, after Lincoln had been elected, Ward was still hopeful of an order from the state for his "Simon Kenton," and I was hopeful of the poetic pre-eminence which I am still foregoing. I used such scraps of time as I could filch from the busy days and nights and gave them to the verse which now seemed to come back from editors oftener than it once did. This hurt, but it did not kill, and I kept on at verse for years in the delusion that it was my calling and that I could make it my living. It was not until four or five years later that a more practical muse persuaded me my work belonged to her, and in the measureless leisure of my Venetian consulate I began to do the various things in prose which I have mostly been doing ever since, for fifty years past. Till then I had no real leisure, but was yet far from the days when anything less than a day seems too small a space to attempt anything in. That is the mood of age and of middle age, but youth seizes any handful of minutes and devotes them to some beginning or ending. It had been my habit ever since I took up journalism to use part of the hour I had for midday dinner in writing literature, and such hours of the night as were left me after my many calls or parties; and now I did not change, even under the stress of the tragical events crowding upon us all.