his loss is irreparable, for never again will they find his equal in
such charming qualities of head and heart.

[Illustration: THE UPPER TERRACES OF MR. STOCKTON'S GARDEN AT
CLAYMONT.]

This is not the place for a critical estimate of the work of Frank R.
Stockton.[2] His stories are, in great part, a reflex of himself. The
bright outlook on life; the courageous spirit; the helpfulness; the
sense of the comic rather than the tragic; the love of domestic life;
the sweetness of pure affection; live in his books as they lived in
himself. He had not the heart to make his stories end unhappily. He knew
that there is much of the tragic in human lives, but he chose to ignore
it as far as possible, and to walk in the pleasant ways which are
numerous in this tangled world. There is much philosophy underlying a
good deal that he wrote, but it has to be looked for; it is not
insistent, and is never morbid. He could not write an impure word, or
express an impure thought, for he belonged to the "pure in heart," who,
we are assured, "shall see God."

[Footnote 2: I may, however, properly quote from the sketch prepared by
Mr. Gary for the Century Club: "He brought to his later work the
discipline of long and rather tedious labor, with the capital amassed by
acute observation, on which his original imagination wrought the
sparkling miracles that we know. He has been called the representative
American humorist. He was that in the sense that the characters he
created had much of the audacity of the American spirit, the thirst for
adventures in untried fields of thought and action, the subconscious
seriousness in the most incongruous situations, the feeling of being at
home no matter what happens. But how amazingly he mingled a broad