He formed the habit of lying in wait for the poet and walking with him, discussing Keats and Burns, Stevenson and Kipling, and others of their common admirations.

One day of days the poet took Allen home with him and read him a new, unpublished poem, and showed him a rare photograph of Stevenson and the outside of a letter just received from Kipling, from the uttermost parts of the world.

It was a fine thing to know a poet and to speak with him face to face,--particularly a poet who sang of his own soil as Allen wished to know it.

Still, Allen did not quite understand how it happened that a poet who wrote of farmers and country-town folk wore eyeglasses and patent-leather shoes and carried a folded silk umbrella in all weathers.
The active politicians who crossed his horizon interested Allen greatly; the rougher and more uncouth they were the more he admired them.

They were figures in the Great Experiment, no matter how sordid or contemptible Harwood pronounced them.