My Reminiscences as a Cowboy

To the generation of 1930, Frank Harris is already a legend. At seventy-five he sits on his balcony by the still Mediterranean waters and remembers his youth. To us, to whom he reveals with the assurance of an eyewitness to many of last century's men of light and leading, his youth appears all business and discourse with personages whose stories are now a part of history - personages like Emerson and Whitman and Carlyle and Ruskin and Whistler, like King Edward and Debs and Bismarck. Others of the Harris gallery are still with us. They were young when he was young, and of one fellowship with him in labor and aspiration. Among these, he names three, Galsworthy and Wells and Shaw, who are still the giants of the world of letters, each in the winter of his life eager about the human future to the end of time. But Harris remembers his youth, and it seems to him golden. Maybe it is because he had a youth as these men had not, a youth wherein the reality was as the boy's dream, and the dream as the reality.