There is a fascination in passing judgements and drawing up class lists. For a time the high intention of the Mind of the Race was forgotten while we talked the narrow "shop" of London literary journalism, and discovered and weighed and log-rolled and--in the case of the more established--blamed and condemned. That Bâle train became less and less like a train and more and more like a descriptive catalogue. For the best part of an afternoon we talked of the young and the new, and then we fell into a discussion about such reputations as Pickthall's and W. H. Hudson's and the late Stephen Crane's, reputations ridiculously less than they ought to be, so that these writers, who are certainly as securely classic as Beckford or Herrick, are still unknown to half the educated English reading public. Was it due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy of publishers? That question led us so far away from the special Bâle train that we never returned to it. But I know that we decided that the real and significant writers were to be only a small portion of the crowd that congested the train; there were also to be endless impostors, imitators, editors, raiders of the world of print.... At every important station there was to be a frightful row about all these people's tickets, and violent attempts to remove doubtful cases.... Then Mr. Clement K. Shorter was to come in to advise and help the conductor.... Ultimately this led to trouble about Mr. Shorter's own credentials.... Some of Boon's jokes about this train were, to say the best of them, obvious. Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble about his excess luggage, for example. Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his ideal of an innocent frankness to a logical completeness in his travelling equipment, was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the train officials. Mr. Thomas Hardy had a first-class ticket but travelled by choice or mistake in a second-class compartment, his deserted place being subsequently occupied by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, a fitted dressing-bag, a writing slope, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introductions, and everything that a promising young novelist can need. The brothers Chesterton, Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up all night in the _wagon-restaurant_ consuming beer enormously and conversing upon immortality and whether it extends to Semitic and Oriental persons. At the end of the train, I remember, there was to have been a horse-van containing Mr. Maurice Hewlett's charger--Mr. Hewlett himself, I believe, was left behind by accident at the Gare de Lyons--Mr. Cunninghame Graham's Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the inseparable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson....