[Excerpt from Chapter XVI, "A Life Cut Short," in THE HUME DYNASTY: AN AMERICAN SAGA by Percival Reeves. Scribner, 1924, pp. 264-267. Opening and closing paragraphs reproduced; middle of the chapter is a tour of August's education (Yale Class of 1893) and of the Humes' family life in those years.]

CHAPTER XVI

A Life Cut Short

Of the three children born to William and Elspeth Hume at Vanderlin Row in the decades after the Civil War, the youngest — August Hume — has left the slenderest and the most private record. Born in November of 1872, he was a boy of delicate constitution, the apple of his mother's late motherhood, the small brother to Edmund and Clara at an interval of ten and of eight years. He was educated at the Port Hume Academy, took his place at Yale in the Class of 1893, and carried into his young adulthood the gentler temperament of his mother, rather than the elder dignities of his father William.

That temperament was not, as events were to disclose, suited to the burdens the Hume line laid upon its sons. August was, in his own way, a different kind of Hume from Edmund; and where Edmund inherited the steel of the Company, August inherited the softer strains of his mother's family — the Blanes of Toronto — whose gift to him was a great fondness for music, and whose curse upon him, it must here be said, was a predisposition to the lung ailments that haunted that family across three generations.

... [continuation describes his Yale years: a prize in classics, a friendship with a future judge, a summer in the Adirondacks; describes his return to Port Hume in the autumn of 1893, his attempts to find a calling in the Company that did not suit his health or his taste] ...

It became necessary, in the spring of 1894, for August to remove himself from the damp climate of the Lakes for the sake of his constitution. His elder brother Edmund — who by that date had taken upon himself the management of most of the Company's affairs — arranged, with an older brother's care, for his removal first to the dryer climate of the American Southwest and later, as his condition permitted, to California. The Humes had, in California, the correspondence of old family friends in San Francisco; and it was upon the hospitality of that city, where the sea air was thought then to be of medical benefit, that August Hume spent the greater part of his last years.

... [several paragraphs describe his life in San Francisco, drawing upon letters August wrote to his sister Clara; the correspondence with Clara is described as "remarkably frequent and loving"; the letters themselves are not quoted] ...

August Hume died of tuberculosis in a lodging house at Russian Hill, San Francisco, on the fourteenth of April, 1903. He was thirty years of age. His body was returned to Port Hume by the courtesy of the Pullman Company, whose express service made the gesture possible. He was buried in the family plot at Rosewood, beside his mother, under a modest stone that his brother Edmund himself composed. The inscription reads only:

August Hume — 1872–1903 — "He loved much, and was much loved."

It is said that Edmund, when the stone was unveiled in 1904, stood before it for a long interval without speaking, and then walked away. Of the great losses of his life, August — a brother whose gentler soul Edmund could neither match nor protect — was one of the keenest. He would not, to the end of his own life, speak of August to strangers. He spoke of him to this writer only upon one condition: that the account should remain, in its essentials, a brother's account.

That I have tried to give, in this chapter; and the reader will forgive me any reticences.