文档介绍：APPRECIATIONS
Appreciations of Richard
Harding Davis
By GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
1
APPRECIATIONS
R. H. D.
BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
"And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid."
He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him,
and so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two is
middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would never
have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his other
brother was Peter Pan.
Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the taking of
sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester Hills for gunsites
against the Mexican invasion. And we have made lists of guns, and
medicines, and tinned things, in case we should ever happen to go
elephant-shooting in Africa. But we weren't going to hurt the elephants.
Once R. H. D. shot a hippopotamus and he was always ashamed and sorry.
I think he never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind of a sportsman.
Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said the last word. Do you
remember the Happy Hunting Ground in "The Bar Sinister"?--"where
nobody hunts us, and there is nothing to hunt."
Experienced persons tell us that a manhunt is the most exciting of all
sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He hunted for wounded men who
were out in front of the trenches and still under fire, and found some of
them and brought them in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an
honorary member of their regiment just because he was charming and a
faithful friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and he
was another.
To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever done a
brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and he talked even better
than he wrote (at his best he wrote like an angel), but I have dusted every
corner of my memory and cannot recall any story of his in which he
played a heroic or essful part. Always he was running at top speed,
or hi