February 11 Tuesday – In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam added to the Feb. 5, 7 letter to Francis H. Skrine.

Feb. 11. I am sorry it [Skrine’s book] is finished. I made it last as long as I could. It was a noble life & most nobly lived. The beauty & cheer & pathos of it move hand in hand together through it all. The passage where he went back alone to the humble early home in India & found it empty & falling to decay—that is a moving picture, eloquent of what success costs us, the pathos of it only realizable to the full when we stand where the march began—& think! I have had that experience, & know the deeps of it. The book stirs every emotion & throbs with every interest that human beings feel; you have done your work well.

Would he have lived if he had not taken that journey to London? I wish he had not ventured it; I wish Lady Hunter had been with him to prevent it. A century will go by before England will realize the whole magnitude of the loss she sustained in his death [MTP].

Sam’s notebook: “Crosby & wife—dinner” [NB 45 TS 3]. Note: Ernest Howard Crosby, active in the Anti-Imperialist League.