never such a school for public speaking as that crowded park afforded, with street-cars grinding and scraping by one side of it and children laughing at their play on the swings and poles which Jones had put there for them; or else standing below the speaker and looking curiously up into his face, and filling him with the fear of treading any moment on their little fingers which, as they clung to the edge, made a border all along the front of the platform. And for a year or so after his death I spoke there every Sunday: we were trying so hard to keep his great work alive.
XXI
It was our interest in the disowned, the outcast,
the poor, and the criminal that drew us first together;
that and the fact that we are gradually
assuming the same attitude toward life. He was full
of Tolstoy at that time, and we could talk of the
great Russian, and I could introduce him to the
other great Russians. He was then a little past
fifty, and had just made the astounding discovery
that there was such a thing as literature in the
world: he had been so busy working all his life that
he had never had time to read, and the whole world
of letters burst upon his vision all suddenly, and the
glorious prospect fairly intoxicated him, so that he
stood like stout Cortez, though not so silent, upon
a peak in Darien.
He was reading Mazzini also, and William Morris
