They had turned themselves inside out, and were things to be intemperately proud of.

In my dissatisfaction I destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography.

But in what remains there are passages which are interesting, and I shall quote from them here and there and now and then, as I go along.
[Sidenote: (1898.)] While we were living in Vienna in 1898 a cablegram came from Keokuk announcing Orion's death.

He was seventy-two years old.

He had gone down to the kitchen in the early hours of a bitter December morning; he had built the fire, and had then sat down at a table to write something; and there he died, with the pencil in his hand and resting against the paper in the middle of an unfinished word--an indication that his release from the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life was mercifully swift and painless.
[_Dictated in 1904._] A quarter of a century ago I was visiting John Hay at Whitelaw Reid's house in New York, which Hay was occupying for a few months while Reid was absent on a holiday in Europe.