with which I was entirely unfamiliar. ...

"I have never known any one who could with equal facility follow
an intricate line of thought through repeated interruptions. I
have seen Mr. Lane, when interrupted in the middle of an involved
sentence of dictation, talk on some other subject for five or ten
minutes and return to his dictation, taking it up where he left it
and completing the sentence so that it could be typed as dictated,
and this without the stenographer's telling him at what point he
had been interrupted."

His letters are peculiarly autobiographical, for whenever his
active mind was engaged on some personal, political, or
philosophical problem, his thought turned naturally to that friend
with whom he would most like to discuss the subject, and, if he
could possibly make the time, to him he wrote just what thoughts
raced through his mind. To Ambassador Page he wrote in 1918, "I
have a very old-fashioned love for writing from day to day what
pops into my mind, contradicting each day what I said the day
before, and gathering from my friends their impressions and their
spirit in the same way." And in another letter he says, "Now I
have gossiped, and preached, and prophesied, and mourned, and
otherwise revealed what passes through a wandering mind in half an
hour, so I send you at the close of this screed, my blessing,
which is a poor gift."

At home on Sunday morning before the fire, he would often write
many letters--some of them twenty pages in length and some mere
scrappy notes. He wrote with a pencil on a pad on his knee,
rapidly stripping off the sheets for me to read, in his desire to