Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/229

 XVII

KING—"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE"

ROM the first he had the grace to put me on close terms with him, although we seldom met when he had not just come from a distant region or was departing for some other point as far. In this wise, I could not free myself from the illusion that he was a kind of Martian—a planetary visitor, of a texture differing from that of ordinary Earth-dwellers. It seemed quite natural that he should map out the globe, and bore through it to see of what it was made. Now that he is gone, I am still looking for his casual return.

There was one occasion which I did not share with others of his present celebrants; a period when I had him to myself, and when he began an episode eventful in even his own full life. This was nothing less than that of his initial visit to the Old World. By chance, with a son in his first year out from Yale, I left New York, in the spring of 1882, on the same steamer which numbered on its passenger-roll Clarence King, and another mining-expert, at that time his partner. Of course I had read with admiration, a decade earlier, the Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, and often had wondered why its luminous author had not shone continuously in our literature. I should have [215]