The Literary Remains of Thomas Bragdon

I was much pained one morning last winter on picking up a copy of the
_Times_ to note therein the announcement of the death of my friend Tom
Bragdon, from a sudden attack of la grippe. The news stunned me. It was
like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky, for I had not even heard that
Tom was ill; indeed, we had parted not more than four days previously
after a luncheon together, at which it was I who was the object of his
sympathy because a severe cold prevented my enjoyment of the whitebait,
the fillet, the cigar, and indeed of everything, not even excepting
Bragdon's conversation, which upon that occasion should have seemed more
than usually enlivening, since he was in one of his most exuberant moods.
His last words to me were, "Take care of yourself, Phil! I should hate to
have you die, for force of habit is so strong with me that I shall forever
continue to lunch with none but you, ordering two portions of everything,
which I am sure I could not eat, and how wasteful that would be!" And now
he had passed over the threshold into the valley, and I was left to mourn.

I had known Bragdon as a successful commission merchant for some ten or
fifteen years, during which period of time we had been more or less
intimate, particularly so in the last five years of his life, when we were
drawn more closely together; I, attracted by the absolute genuineness of
his character, his delightful fancy, and to my mind wonderful originality,
for I never knew another like him; he, possibly by the fact that I was one
of the very few who could entirely understand him, could sympathize with
his peculiarities, which were many, and was always ready to enter into any
one of his odd moods, and with quite as much spirit as he himself should
display. It was an ideal friendship.

It had been our custom every summer to take what Bragdon called spirit
trips together--that is to say, generally in the early spring, Bragdon and
I would choose some out-of-the-way corner of the world for exploration; we
would each read all the literature that we could find concerning the
chosen locality, saturate our minds with the spirit, atmosphere, and
history of the place, and then in August, boarding a small schooner-rigged
boat belonging to Bragdon, we would cruise about the Long Island Sound or
sail up and down the Hudson River for a week, where, tabooing all other
subjects, we would tell each other all that we had been able to discover
concerning the place we had decided upon for our imaginary visit. In this
way we became tolerably familiar with several places of interest which
neither of us had ever visited, and which, in my case, financial
limitations, and in Bragdon's, lack of time, were likely always to prevent
our seeing. As I remember the