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We had our meals together, sometimes in the crowded and rather smart Bastasini's, but more often in the maelstrom of humanity that nightly packed the Olympos Palace restaurant. Davis, Shepherd, Hare, and I, with sometimes Mr. and Mrs. John Bass, made up these parties, which, for a period of about two weeks or so, were the most enjoyable daily events of our lives.

Under the glaring lights of the restaurant, and surrounded by British, French, Greek, and Serbian officers, German, Austrian, and Bulgarian civilians, with a sprinkling of American, English, and Scotch nurses and doctors, packed so solidly in the huge, high-ceilinged room that the waiters could barely pick their way among the tables, we hung for hours over our dinners, and left only when the landlord and his Austrian wife counted the day's receipts and paid the waiters at the end of the evening.

One could not imagine a more charming and delightful companion than Davis during these days. While he always asserted that he could not make a speech, and was terrified at the thought of standing up at a banquet-table, yet, sitting at a dinner-table with a few friends who were only too eager to listen rather than to talk, his stories, covering personal experiences in all parts of the world, were intensely vivid, with that remarkable "holding" quality of description which characterizes his writings.

He brought his own bread-a coarse, brown sort, which he preferred to the better white bread—and with it he ate great quantities of butter. As we sat down at the table his first demand was for "Mastika," a peculiar Greek drink distilled from mastic gum, and his second demand invariably was "Du beurre!" with the "r's" as silent as the stars; and if it failed to come at once the waiter was made to feel the enormity of his tardiness.

The reminiscences ranged from his early newspaper days in Philadelphia, and skipping from Manchuria to Cuba and Central America, to his early Sun days under Arthur Brisbane; they ranged through an endless variety of personal experiences which very nearly covered the

whole course of American history in the past twenty years.

Perhaps to him it was pleasant to go over his remarkable adventures, but it could not have been half as pleasant as it was to hear them, told as they were with a keenness of description and brilliancy of humorous comment that made them gems of narrative.

At times, in our work, we all tried our hands at describing the Salonika of those early days of the Allied occupation, for it was really what one widely travelled British officer called it—"the most amazingly interesting situation I've ever seen

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but Davis's description was far and away the best, just as his description of Vera Cruz was the best, and his wonderful story of the entry of the German army into Brussels was matchless as one of the great pieces of reporting in the present war.

In thinking of Davis, I shall always remember him for the delightful qualities which he showed in Salonika. He was unfailingly considerate and thoughtful. Through his narratives one could see the pride which he took in the width and breadth of his personal relation to the great events of the past twenty years. His vast scope of experiences and equally wide acquaintanceship with the big figures of our time, were amazing, and it was equally amazing that one of such a rich and interesting history could tell his stories in such a simple way that the personal element was never obtrusive.

When he left Salonika he endeavored to obtain permission from the British staff to visit Moudros, but, failing in this, he booked his passage on a crowded little Greek steamer, where the only obtainable accommodation was a lounge in the dining saloon. We gave him a farewell dinner, at which the American consul and his family, with all the other Americans then in Salonika, were present, and after the dinner we rowed out to his ship and saw him very uncomfortably installed for his voyage.

He came down the sea ladder and waved his hand as we rowed away. That was the last I saw of Richard Harding Davis.

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THE SON OF PATRICK O'MOIRA

By Margaret Adelaide Wilson

ILLUSTRATIONS BY WILLIAM VAN DRESSER

AT, Pat, no name but that!" came a mocking chant from the basement. "I'd teach ye what me name is," retorted Patsy, clinching his fists; "I'd write it on the dirty mugs of ye, if ye stop skulkin' down there, cowards ye are!"

That they were his ancient enemies, his superiors in size and strength, he knew: Jacob Roschky, the Pole, and heavy-witted Karl Steinberg, the saloon-keeper's son.

"Ve don't fight dem dat has no names,' ," sneered Karl in tardy reply. The coarse taunt scattered Patsy's prudence to the winds. He leaped forward with a cry of rage, and would have plunged right into the ambush behind the broken window had not a low command from overhead arrested him.

"Patsy!" called his mother. "Patsy, lad, come away up!"

Patsy hesitated, but there was a note not to be gainsaid in his mother's voice, and with a last defiance to the hidden foe he dashed through the door and up the narrow stairway to the little room where she sat at her perpetual lace-making.

He had not meant to tell his mother the cause of the trouble below, but under her gentle questioning his sore little heart could contain itself no longer.

"If only I could say who me father was," he choked out at last. "But it's Pat no name, and Pat who's yer daddy, till I'm weary of living, and that's truth!" Nora thrust her work aside with a low cry and gathered her son to her arms.

"They've been saying that to ye!" she murmured in a stricken voice. "And I never dreaming, but thinking of ye as a baby still!"

With swift remorse she recalled the terrible time six years ago when she had come with her three-year-old son to the tenement, a girl half-mad with broken pride and outraged love, and remembered how she had tried to silence the curious

questions of her neighbors by flinging a sharp challenge to the conventions.

"Nora O'Carroll's me name," she had announced to Mrs. Steinberg with a defiant lift of her chin; then, noticing her visitor's sly glance at her bare left hand she had added with a level look, "it's me maiden name, and I'll be known by no other."

By sundown the news of Nora the ringless and unashamed had passed to every virtuous matron in Harbor Court, and thereafter the stranger was left to the solitude she craved. To the effect of her defiance on Patsy's future she had never given a thought-his identity then had seemed so utterly wrapped up in her own.

"And I've brought this on him," she groaned in bitter self-reproach, "just because me pride wouldn't bear their knowing the truth! Listen, Patsy darling," she went on, bending over him, "listen, and whisht with your crying. I didn't mean to make it hard for ye. But your daddy -he went away and left us, and I couldn't bear to speak of him after.”

"But why did he leave us?" asked Patsy, lifting a tear-stained face.

"He had to," was Nora's low reply. "I can't be telling you more. You're named after him," she added, tightening her clasp as if the words hurt her. "Patrick O'Moira's your name, though I've kept it from you all these years!"

"Patrick O'Moira," repeated Patsy, and the thrill of content in his voice stabbed his mother afresh. "A fine name, isn't it, mother? And won't they be jealous when they hear it," he went on with growing excitement, "and me making them call me by it all the time now! I must be goin' down to tell them," he added, wriggling in her embrace.

"Go, then," said Nora bitterly, giving him a little push. "Tell them, if that's all ye care for, and if ye don't care at all for the sorrow the name's brought me!" The light died from Patsy's face.

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Drawn by William van Dresser.

"I'd teach ye what me name is," retorted Patsy.-Page 98.

"I'll not be tellin' if ye don't want me," he said, renouncing with a gasp the possession that was to have made life tolerable. Then, since he was little more than a baby still, his tremendous manliness deserted him, and he clasped his mother's knees in a passion of grief.

"But what like daddy is he that I'm never to speak of him?" he wailed, "and why doesn't he ever come back to us?"

"He'd come if he could; ye mustn't think hardly of him for that," said Nora in a strained voice. It was as if some hidden loyalty drove her against her will to defend the father to his little son. "He he said he'd come back when he'd served his time he cried when he kissed you good-by-but I can't talk of it more!"

She turned her head toward the window, then with a painful effort at composure gathered up her work again.

"Run along now to Mother Flaherty's for the bread. And tell whom ye please," she added wearily. "I'm thinking it's best so, after all."

Her eyes, with their purple black fringes, of which Patsy's own were so exact a copy, became intent upon the flying needle, and Patsy knew that he must work out this new and puzzling question as he had learned to work out so many others, alone.

"What's yer hurry?" demanded Mother Flaherty querulously as, absorbed in his thoughts, Patsy received his bread and started for the door again. "Can't ye stop a minute with a poor old body? Sure, and it's lonely enough I am with me son Tim, that was me youngest and all that's left to me of five, gone overseas to fight for his counthry. Cruel it was for him to go away and leave his poor mother so!"

This was a new view of Tim Flaherty, who had been the hero of the street when he received his call and had gone away five months before.

"Why did he leave you, then?" demanded Patsy with unexpected vehemence. "It wasn't right, and you needin' him so!"

"Yer not to be speakin' of me Tim as if he'd done wrong," reproved Mother Flaherty with quick change of front. "He went because he had to serve his time. He cried bitter at leavin', and

twice he kissed me good-by, but he had to go."

At the repetition of this phrase Patsy remembered what his mother had said, and his face lighted with sudden understanding.

"Then was that what happened to me daddy!" he murmured, more in assertion than questioning.

"Eh, what?" queried Mother Flaherty confusedly. Patsy laid his loaf upon the counter and came nearer.

"It's something me mother telled me that I wasn't understandin' before," he explained, looking up at her. "She was sayin' how me daddy had to go, too— years ago that was- -and he cried when he kissed me good-by. Patrick O'Moira, me father. I'm named after him," he added with pride.

"Patrick O'Moira!" stammered Mother Flaherty. "But Nora never telled me. And ye say he went long time ago!"

Patsy nodded, unaware of the bearing of this question. "Me mother could never bear to speak of him, for sorrow of missin' him so. Ye like the name?" he added wistfully. "Patrick O'Moira, ye like the sound of it?"

"It has a fine, grand sound," pronounced Mother Flaherty. But something troubled her still. "Must have been the African wars they called him to fight in," she said as if to herself. "What a weary time for poor Nora, they keepin' him soldierin' all these years!"

"Good soldiers is scarce," Patsy reminded her, wagging his head.

"He'll not be a better soldier than me Tim," was Mother Flaherty's jealous response. "Tim's a born fighter. Hero's blood he is, though I do say it."

A streak of yellow gaslight from an open doorway lay across the lower hall as Patsy came home. Within the room Jacob Roschky crouched over a tiny stove, watching his two large-nosed older brothers busy with their long shears over heavy cloth.

"Pat, Pat, no name-" began Jacob shrilly as the little boy crossed the light.

Patsy darted through the open door, seized Jacob by his scrawny neck, and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat.

"Me name's Patrick O'Moira, just

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