literature and I doubt if there is anywhere a high imaginative figure or a great poetic image that was unknown to him. Passages from the standard poets came to him upon the slightest suggestion, and oftentimes he would recite them from memory and at great length. No man more quickly or more surely discriminated the good from the bad. Mr. Lucius Bigelow, long a brilliant contributor to the Oregonian's editorial page, once remarked that Mr. Scott's mind was "a refinery of metals, taking in all kinds of ore and with an almost mechanical discrimination selecting the fine from the base." The most trivial incident would draw from him the loftiest selections from the storehouse of his reading.
Mr. Levinson,[1] another long time member of the Oregonian family, recently told me of a characteristic incident. One evening he came upon Mr. Scott in the hall with his key in his office door, when apropos of nothing he looked up and began to recite a passage from White's Mysterious Night—"When our first parent knew thee from report divine," etc. Having finished the passage, his face wreathed itself in a smile and he remarked: "No, Joe; I didn't write that"—and opening his office door, walked in and sat down to his labors. Thus at unexpected times and in whimsical ways he illuminated the daily life of the Oregonian office, making it of all the workshops I have ever known the most delightful and inspiring.
Nature in all its aspects had for Mr. Scott a tremendous fascination. He luxuriated in the mere weather—good or bad. He would stand at his window and look out upon the dreariest day with a certain joy in it. Fine weather with him was an infinite delight. He was singularly uplifted by fine views, and perhaps of the multitudes who have gazed upon Mt. Hood no one ever so intensely enjoyed in it. From the east windows of his office on the eighth floor of the "Tower"—for so his office came to be known to the public—Mt. Hood was, before the period of the sky-scraper, in full view. He kept
- ↑ N. T. Levinson now publishes Fresno Herald; many years city editor and Sunday editor The Oregonian.
