Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/131

 how to treat that." Mr. Ernest Bross, a long-time and very able editorial assistant, suggested: "Just print what he says and put under it as your sole comment, 'Wouldn't that jar you! Mr. Scott pooh-poohed the suggestion; but half an hour later he came into my room, which adjoined his own, and read to me a paragraph in which in modified form he had used the suggested expression. He gurgled over it with the keenest delight, and later when his proofs came he walked through the editorial rooms reading it to others of the staff. The following morning, with the paper spread before him, he ran over the particular paragraph with boisterous satisfaction in a literary prank.

Competent as his judgment was with respect to his own work as well as to the work of others, it was nevertheless Mr. Scott's practice to read over his prepared articles to his assistants. "Trying it on the dog" was his familiar phrase for this form of experimentation. He always invited criticism though I do not recall many instances in which any of us were wise enough to help him unless it were at the point of restraint. But if there came to him from any source a really good suggestion he had no vanities leading to its rejection. I think the office boy, if he had had a point to make, would have been listened to as respectfully as his most trusted assistant.

Although a constant and profound reader, Mr. Scott spent little time upon light literature. Newspapers interested him in so far as they gave him information or suggested reflections upon current events, but he cared little for magazines and would oftener cast them aside after running over the table of contents than read them. He lived—I use his own phrase—with books; and the books he lived with were books which presented to him new facts or old facts in new relations and which dealt with broad views of things. Books of mere entertainment he valued not at all. Of really good fiction he read all there was. Of poetry he was a constant reader and re-reader. I think he was familiar with every great poem in