Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/63

 *ness of the fact that all who knew them can never think of them, with however much regret, without a smile at some remembered instance of their unfailing humor.

When I mentioned them, I had fully intended to give some instances of that humor, but when it was not of a raciness, it was of such a rare and delicate charm, such a fleeting, evanescent quality, that it is impossible to separate it from all that was going on about it. It is easy enough to recall if not to evoke again the scene in which Ben King and Charlie Almy, sitting for three hours at a stretch, gave a wholly impromptu impersonation of two solemn missionaries just returned from some unmapped wilderness and recounting their deeds in order to inspire contributions; it is not difficult either to recall the slight figure of Charlie Seymour, with his red hair, his comedian's droll face, and to listen to him recounting those adventures which life was ever offering him, whether on one of his many journeys as a war correspondent to the region of the Dakotas when his friends among the Ogallalla and Brûlé Sioux were on the war-path again, or in some less picturesque tragedy he had been reporting nearer home—say a murder in South Clark Street; but, like so many of the keener joys of life, the charm of his stories was fleeting and gone with the moment that gave them.

His humor colored everything he wrote, as the humor of Finley Peter Dunne colored everything he wrote; and both were skilled in the art of the news story. We were all reading Kipling in those days,