In "My Life," Josiah Flynt says, "I have spoken of Arthur Symons' interest in my first efforts to describe tramp life. I think it was he and the magazine editors who abetted me in my scribblings, rather than the university and its doctrines of 'original research.'... His (Symons') books and personal friendship, are both valuable to me, but for very different reasons. I seldom think of Symons the man, when I read his essays and verses, and I only infrequently think of his books, or of him as a literary man at all, when we are together."

Josiah Flynt not only greatly admired Arthur Symons, the distinguished Englishman, as poet, master of prose, and critic, but had an affectionate regard for him, one expression of which was his use of the nickname, "Symonsky." While Flynt's guest in Berlin, Symons had some difficulty in persuading a letter-carrier that a communication from London was for Arthur Symons, Esq., and not for some Herr Symonsky! The Slavic twist to the name amused Flynt, who seized upon it. His shy, affectionate nature found an outlet in renaming close friends.

After one of his visits to London, I asked Flynt if he had seen much of Symons.

"Symonsky put me up, you know," he replied; then with a quick, side glance and a smile, as he lighted a cigarette, "but, to be perfectly frank, when I went to bed, he was getting up!"

Here we have defined in a sentence the difference between the two men. Their natures, like their lives, were never parallel; they only just touched one another's imaginations in passing!

Flynt was then studying London's Under World—the great city's blackest corners and darkest ways; while Symons, as it chanced, was seldom out of the lime-light circle of London concert halls, preparatory to writing his "London Nights."

Both men were the sons of clergymen, and launched in life's calmest, safest waters, at about the same time, though on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It was their own volition which led them to take to life's high seas. Symons went from his small town to London, which, in spite of continental sojourns, has remained his permanent mooring. Flynt took to the "open" at an early age, and tied up in whatever harbor the storm drove him. American by blood and birth, he felt at home in Russia, Germany, France, or the British Isles, if given the Mask of No Identity.

One of the swiftest currents of London life flows down the Strand. There, Josiah Flynt, in what disguise he chose, could do his "work," and, when he would, step over the sill of the old Temple and find a welcome from his friend, who had chambers in Fountain Court, that silent square of green, which slopes to the Thames, and is kept fresh and cool by its jets of water and great shade trees. Symons lived in the building to the right, after entering the Court, and up a winding flight of old stone steps.

It was in these bachelor quarters of his (he has since married and moved away) that I first saw Symons, the year after Flynt's "Tramping with Tramps" had appeared in the Century Magazine. I had been invited, through a mutual friend, for tea, one cool afternoon in June, and we sat on an immense tufted sofa, before the grate, while our host stood, back to the fire, and talked of other people's work.

I can see him now, big, blond and very English, his hands deep in the pockets of his gray tweeds; an old, brown velveteen jacket, faded blue socks and soft tan slippers, harmonizing with his "stage-setting"—well mellowed by time. Books lined the walls, and a spinnet, on which Symons played, when alone, stood in one corner. He had prepared tea and elaborate sweets for us, and then forgot to offer them, so busy was he, talking of his friend, Christina Rossetti, whose poems he had just edited! When he spoke of Olive Schreiner, some one asked him if she was interesting, and I remember quite well Symons' reply: "I stood all one night listening to her talk!"

Even at nineteen, in his "Introduction to the Study of Browning," commended by Robert Browning himself, Symons had proved himself to be an artist, and he is always lyric. Flynt was never an artist in the same sense, in his literary work—and epic to the end! He knew and understood the ways of men, and had the gift of words; but when he wrote for publication, his imagination seemed chained to earth. It may be that he was too much "on the inside" to get his subject in perspective. Then, too, it must be remembered that Flynt was the tramp writing, not the literary man tramping.

Armed with ancestors of distinction, birth, training, education and the influence of cultured parents, he abhorred all social anchors and obligations. I remember his once saying to me, "My mother has sent me my books from Berlin. Her idea is to anchor me, I think, but I'll leave them boxed for a while, for I'm uncertain about my plans." He was "always a-movin' on!"

Flynt was not a great reader, yet he had a wide knowledge of books—gleaned one scarcely knew when. The child of book-loving parents, he started out in life with a valuable equipment—an innate respect for books and their authors. In every case, however, I think that his chief interest lay in the man, not his literary output. In spite of the sordid realism of his writings, the manner of his last years, and the regretted circumstances of his death, there was a poetic vein, which, like a single, golden thread, ran in and out, the warp and woof of his mind. This betrayed itself in conversations with intimates, and when discussing books of travel or their authors. Especially did Sir Richard Burton and George Borrow fire his imagination. "Lavengro" and its author were discussed during one of our last conversations.

The "white road" and the sea may have meant something to him as such, but to me he never spoke of either, except as highways; hence I conclude that as such only did they make their appeal to him. Man, not nature, attracted him, and it was always man in the meshes of civilization.

He was a victim to morbid self-consciousness, and this was one reason for his avoiding people of the class in which he was born. Give him a part in a play—he was gifted as an actor—the disguise of a vagabond, or whisky with which to fortify himself, and the man's spirit sprang out of its prison of flesh, like an uncaged bird.

This effect which whisky had upon him, led Flynt to give it as a reason for the "perpetual thirst" of some. He used to say, "Whisky makes it possible for me to approach men with a manner which ignores all class barriers. Pass the whisky and it's man to man—hobo, hod-carrier or king!"

Flynt was a slave to tobacco, which he preferred in the form of cigarettes. One never thinks of him without one, so no wonder he was called "Cigarette" in Trampdom!

His family thought that the too early use of tobacco stunted his growth, for, when seated, the upper part of his body, being broad and strong, suggested a larger man than he proved to be when on his feet. He stood not more than five feet three inches. He was naturally thin and nervous, with quick movements of the body, and an ever-changing expression of face—a face clean-shaven and rather boyish. None of his photographs give any idea as to his appearance, because the abiding impression received from him was produced by his magnetic personality and individual mannerisms, one of which was a way of dropping his head forward and looking up through frowning eyebrows. He decorated his speech with Russian, French or German words, thrown into a sentence haphazard, and spoke in a voice pitched low and used rhythmically. He had an impressionable, volatile nature, and seemed really to become one of the race which at the moment filled his mental vision.

Flynt's ethical code was that of the Under World, and, in some respects, superior to the one in use on the Surface of Life.

A prominent sociologist said recently, "Flynt had the field to himself; there is no one to take his place at present. Few men who live and know the life of the Under World, as he did, have his mental equipment. Many can retain the facts, but are unable to handle them as satisfactorily; then, too, to be friend and companion of tramps and criminals, and of men like Tolstoy and Ibsen, is to possess a wide range of octaves in human experience and mental grasp!"

Flynt's talent for languages enabled him to pick up the vernacular, even of underground Russia, in an incredibly short time.

As he says himself, Wanderlust, not the scientist's curiosity to verify theories, led him on to his well-merited distinction as criminologist, and down to his ultimate undoing, at the early age of thirty-eight.

"Beyond the East the sunrise,
Beyond the West the sea,
And the East and West the Wanderlust
That will not let me be."

While Flynt had most of the appetites, good and bad, possible to man, he was not a weak man, but a physically selfish one, strong in his determination to "enjoy." Condemned to an early death by the excessive use of stimulants, he agreed to write his "Life," did so, and then shut himself in his room in Chicago, to pass out—unafraid, unaccompanied, uncontrolled—a characteristic ending!

That Josiah Flynt has started on his long journey, that this world will see him no more, is impossible for his near friends to realize, so accustomed are they to his periodical disappearances and his unfailing return to their midst.

He who preferred the byways, the crooked winding paths, has at last struck the broad, straight road where there is no turning back. It is he who must wait for us now, as we push on, with his cheerful "Good luck! Be good! Don't forget me!" ringing in our ears, and in our hearts Stevenson's words:

"He is not dead, this friend, not dead,
But in the path we mortals tread,
Got some few trifling steps ahead,
And nearer to the end,
So that you, too, once past the bend,
Shall meet again, as, face to face, this friend
You fancy dead....
"Push gaily on, strong heart! The while
You travel forward, mile by mile,
Till you can overtake,
He strains his eyes to search his wake,
Or, whistling as he sees you through the break,
Waits on the stile."
(R.L.S.)

Flynt often talked of his death after disease fastened upon him, but always with an inconsequence as to what lay beyond the grave—not bravado, but the philosopher's acquiescence to the inevitable, whatever it be. He had great faith in the loyalty of friends who might survive him. "So-and-so will speak a good word for me, I know!" he would say. Separation, by geographical distances, never bothered him, yet he wrote but few letters. He seemed to get satisfaction out of his belief that he and his nearest friends communicated by thought transference: "The wires are always up!" Doubtless he passed out with the conviction that this would continue.

The man's spirit remained childlike in its tender, confiding quality, and pure, in spite of the fact that he dragged his poor body through the mire of life.

His generous nature and faithful friendship have set in motion currents which are eternal.