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across the Atlantic, for they were as fresh in his memory as though he had been there yesterday. He would usually tell of the time when he met Prince Henry of Prussia, or perhaps about his interview with that intrepid aviator, Santos-Dumont. His stories sounded somewhat like Du Maurier, and they went well with the fresh smell of ink from the composing room that blew down the dusty stairs from the floor above. Once when he was examining the photographs in the Manchester Guardian Mr. Jenks contributed an interesting sidelight on his private life.
    â€œBy thunder,” Mr. Jenks said. He was looking at the photograph of a fountain in Stuttgart. The fountain consisted of a thinly draped girl holding a conch shell from which came a jet of water that descended into a basin held up by sea horses. “By thunder,” Mr. Jenks said, pointing to the photograph of that marble figure, “I slept with that girl once, in Berlin, in 1885—” At least this was what his old friends on the paper told Jeffrey.
    â€œWhat?” Walter said. “How could you? She’s a statue, Mr. Jenks.”
    Walter was always a little slow on the uptake then, and when everybody began to laugh, he turned beet-red. He was a shy boy, and he knew that he had spoken out of turn, but Mr. Jenks was always kind to the young men. He never barked at them the way Mr. Fernald did.
    â€œYes, yes,” Mr. Jenks said, “she’s a statue now, but she wasn’t a statue then. Her name was Tinka.”
    â€œOh, God,” Mr. Fernald said, “excuse me just a minute,” and he pushed back his swivel chair and ran out front to the editorial room to tell Mr. Eldridge and Mr. Nichols, who did the columns called “The Listener” and “Books and Authors.” And then Mr. Fernald went in back to the City Desk and then he told old Frank Sims, who was the foreman of the composing room. That is the sort of thing that sticks in a journalist’s memory. Whenever any of the old crowd spoke of Walter afterwards, in spite of all the years between, they would somehow get back to the statue.
    They would say, “But she’s a statue, Mr. Jenks,” and then although their ways had not crossed in years, and though Mr. Jenks was moldering in his grave, and though a lot of them were also dead or dead-broke, and though the old paper had folded up, somehow those bright days would come back and they would all be drawn together. Outsiders could never see why it was as funny as it really was. You had to be a part of the mystic brotherhood in that old telegraph room. You had to have the feel of it and the smell of it.
    â€œMy God,” Walter said once, “can’t anybody ever forget it? Why, they even told it at an informal little dinner that the Governor General gave for me in Hong Kong—and back in London, even Winston knows about it.”
    â€œWinston who?” someone asked, and Walter blushed slightly. He never seemed able to tell whether or not people were serious.
    â€œChurchill,” he said, “Mr. Churchill.”
    â€œHow about the Duke of Windsor?” someone asked.
    â€œWho? David?” Walter asked, and he brightened. Clearly he wished to get away from his salad days. “Did I ever tell you boys about that swim we took together at Deauville?”
    Once, during the September that marked the second year of World War II, when Jeffrey had been in Boston, he had looked up Mr. Fernald in Woburn. It was years since he had “got through,” as the saying was, and there was no longer any paper and he even had a sickening uncertainty as to whether Mr. Fernald might be alive or dead or in a poorhouse. But Mr. Fernald was there in Woburn in the house that he had bought out of his sixty-five a week. He was sitting on his front piazza with his feet up on the railing watching his boy Earl, who was a clerk in Kresge’s, mow the patch of lawn out front. Mr. Fernald looked very frail and