Page:William-morris-and-the-early-days-of-the-socialist-movement.djvu/93

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WILLIAM MORRIS

Luckily two of our comrades were good singers. James Thomson (a great-grandson of the poet Burns), who had a delightfully pure tenor voice, sang Burns' 'I gaed a waefu' gate yestreen' and 'Mary Morrison.' McKechnie, a young West-Highlander with a capital baritone range and an endless repertory, sang one or two Gaelic songs and several Scottish humorous songs, including 'The barrin' o' the door,' 'The wee Cooper o' Fife,' and 'Phairshon swore a feud.' Morris was greatly taken with McKechnie's singing, and joined with us in the choruses. McKechnie then sang Greave's Irish song 'Ballyhooly,' heard by us for the first time.

Sung as it was with great Celtic gusto, the song fairly captivated Morris, and again and again he hummed over the rollicking refrain 'And they call it lemonade in Ballyhooly!' A month or two later, when I visited him in London, he chanted snatches of the song as I sat with him while he was designing some tapestry piece in the library.

It was now evening. The outside world was dark and deep in snow, and our hopes of having a crowded meeting at the evening lecture had completely vanished. There was only just time for a cup of tea, which was served in the rooms, before going to the meeting. We then linked hands together and sang 'Auld Lang Syne,' hailed the coming of the revolution and International Socialism, and marched forth on our tramp through the ankle-deep snow to the Waterloo Hall.

At the hall we had to distribute among us the details of manning the pay-box, selling literature, and acting as stewards. To our pleasant surprise, notwithstanding the snowstorm, quite a good audience turned up for the lecture, at least 500—a couple of hundred more would have crowded the hall. The subject of the lecture was 'Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century,' which, needless to say, Morris wrought into a magnificent vindication of the aims and hopes of Socialism. He was in excellent trim on the plat-