E. S. Nadal

The same familiar motion screen which keeps for us the personality of these well-remembered Centurions perpetuates still another characteristic figure. Ehrman Syme Nadal had lived through a singularly varied career. Successively schoolteacher, government employee in two such dissociated services as the Mint and the Dead Letter Office, lecturer on English literature at Columbia, twice Secretary of the United States Legation at London, two years newspaper editor and all the time, at intervals, writer of reminiscent essays and dealer in horses for his own account and that of others—the list suggests at least a life of manifold activities. Most of us in these later days will recall Nadal as stretched out in his favorite lounging attitude on one of the library easy chairs, wholly immersed in the last book which had absorbed his interest. Little that he read reappeared in what he wrote. But his magazine sketches brought vividly to life the West Virginia community where he was born eighty years ago and the London of the late seventies, which he saw from the same cheerful diplomatic windows as did his chief, James Russell Lowell.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1923 Century Association Yearbook