a pair of field glasses on his desk and it was his habit every day many times to gaze at the beautiful picture athwart the eastern sky. "I suppose," he remarked one day, "that I keep as close tab on Mt. Hood as anybody, but I have to tell you that in the tens of thousands of times that I have looked at it I have never failed to find in it some new charm." Once in the early evening he burst into my room, next his own, in what was to him a state of positive agitation. "Look! Look!" he exclaimed. My first thought was that some terrible tragedy had stirred him; but the scene was the full summer moon emerging as if from the body of the mountain. "You will probably/he said, "never in your life behold that amazing conjunction again." So with every other aspect of this ever changing mountain. It was his singular love for it, I think, that with all of us—certainly with me—has given to Mt. Hood a certain identification with Mr. Scott. I never look upon it without seeing not alone the mountain, but the rugged figure of the "Old Man"—for so in affection we always styled him when his back was turned—in his peculiar pose standing at his window, glass in hand, gazing, gazing, gazing!
I have said that Mr. Scott was not by nature a writer; and truth to tell he was a bit contemptuous of those who were. He had a sneering phrase which he often applied to easy, graceful, purposeless work. "Feeble elegance" was his characterization of all such. He not only wrote with his own hand, but perhaps for every column of finished matter which he produced he made a column and a half of manuscript. Oftentimes not only his desk but the floor about him would be littered with sheets of paper written over but rejected. He detested slovenliness in the form of a manuscript and would laboriously erase words, phrases and whole sentences and rewrite over the space thus regained. His thought was definite but he made serious work of getting it into form; and he never shirked any labor to this end, although to the end of his life it was always a labor. He had one curious habit which bears a certain relationship to the quality of his work. Oftentimes while pondering over the form of a sentence, he would write
