Henry Watterson

Ability of varying kinds and degrees he had, a veritable genius for journalism and a real capacity for affection.

He spent it freely though not wastefully or joyously, for the possession of it rather flattered his vanity than made occasion for pleasure.

Indignantly I replied: “Go to the devil—you have not money enough—there is not money enough in the universe—to buy an hour of my season’s loaf.

I did not think I could afford to have you lose on my suggestion and I went to cover your loss, when I found five thousand shares of Texas Pacific transferred on the books of the company in your name.

All I make we’ll divide, and all we lose I’ll pay.

He possessed the daring of the typical Kentuckian, with the dead calm of the stoic philosopher; imperturbable; never vexed or querulous or excited; denying himself none of the indulgences of the gentleman of leisure.

The Yankee girl with a dot had become before the world war a regular quarry for impecunious aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimonial results tragic in their frequency and squalor.

Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles join surpassing ignorance of foreign society.

The situation may be the better understood when I add that “negro testimony”—the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made freedmen as witnesses—barred by the state constitution, was the burning issue.

There was scarcely a sinister purpose that was not alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was not undertaken to put it down and drive it out.

That bread cast upon the waters—“‘dough’ put out at usance,” as Joseph Jefferson used to phrase it—shall return after many days has been I dare say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of kindness, conscious or unconscious.

Why, general,” I said, “I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your politics.

Jackson, a prisoner of war, was liberated, a lad of sixteen, from the British pen at Charleston, without a relative, a friend or a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through the most aristocratic community of the country…

But a few years later she made her banter good and lived to see her husband President of the United States and with him to occupy the White House at Washington.

In the Senate, Chandler was a match for Toombs; and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and Lamar.

Not until I threatened to turn Texas over to England did I finally succeed.

Everybody got drunk,” I once heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, “and I realized that somebody must get sober and keep sober.

So inded he was; yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose, altogether the statesman and orator.

Some one has called him “The Lincoln of letters.” That is striking, suggestive and apposite.

He had loved me, but had always feared that I would end by disgracing the family—being hanged or something—but the “work’us,” that was beyond him; he had not thought it would come to that.

But, I tell you what, if you’ll put up five hundred dollars I’ll put up five hundred more, we’ll fetch our chap across and set him in as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy’s fat boy won’t be a marker to him!

The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived upon the scene.

Thus, at the outset of a career from which much was to be expected, a man, possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure.

The first money he made was applied to the purchase of the old family homestead in Maine, which he presented to his mother.

He had a great respect for scholarly culture and personal respectability, and thought that if he could get time and health he might do something “in the genteel comedy line.” He had a humorous novel in view, and a series of more aspiring…