Never, too, had I been more impressed with the suavity, the agreeableness, the general charm of his manner.  He had determined during the coming winter to learn to ride the wheel, and we then and there planned to take a bicycle trip during the following summer, as we had previously made excursions together on horseback.  When we parted, it was with the agreement that we should meet the next spring in Washington and fix definitely upon the time and region of our intended ride.  It was on a Saturday morning that I bade him good-by, apparently in the best of health and spirits.  It was on the evening of the following Saturday —­October 20th—­that the condensed, passionless, relentless message which the telegraph transmits, informed me that he had died that afternoon.

That very day he had lunched at a friend’s, where were gathered several of his special associates who had chanced to come together at the same house, and then had gone to the office of the Hartford Courant.  There was not the slightest indication apparent of the end that was so near.  After the company broke up, he started out to pay a visit to one of the city parks, of which he was a commissioner.  On his way thither, feeling a certain faintness, he turned aside into a small house whose occupants he knew, and asked to sit down for a brief rest, and then, as the faintness increased, to lie undisturbed on the lounge for a few minutes.  The few minutes passed, and with them his life.  In the strictest sense of the words, he had fallen asleep.  From one point of view it was an ideal way to die.  To the individual, death coming so gently, so suddenly, is shorn of all its terrors.  It is only those who live to remember and to lament that the suffering comes which has been spared the victim.  Even to them, however, is the consolation that though they may have been fully prepared for the coming of the inevitable event, it would have been none the less painful when it actually came.

Warner as a writer we all know.  The various and varying opinions entertained about the quality and value of his work do not require notice here.  Future times will assign him his exact position in the roll of American authors, and we need not trouble ourselves to anticipate, as we shall certainly not be able to influence, its verdict.  But to only a comparatively few of those who knew him as a writer was it given to know him as a man; to still fewer to know him in that familiarity of intimacy which reveals all that is fine or ignoble in a man’s personality.  Scanty is the number of those who will come out of that severest of ordeals so successfully as he.  The same conclusion would be reached, whether we were to consider him in his private relations or in his career as a man of letters.  Among the irritable race of authors no one was freer from petty envy or jealousy.  During many years of close intercourse, in which he constantly gave utterance to his views both of men and things with absolute unreserve, I