“Thank you. Yes, I was wrong there. The fact is, I have so many articles to write that I compose two at a time in my mind, and they get muddled up. An editor should always be accurate, and Methodist readers are cranky and hard to please.” He was a Methodist parson himself, which did not prevent him saying exactly what he thought. He lunched off dates and bananas, which he kept in a bag beside his desk, and that same desk was in such disorder that he never could find what he wanted, and I was not surprised to learn that, before I came, the printers got the wrong papers, and that many of the children’s pictures got descriptions underneath that did not belong to them--for instance, a boy blowing a bubble was published over a few lines describing the habits of snakes, “as seen in our illustration,” and so forth. I got on so well with the little Methodist that he wanted to come to the evening French classes I was giving at fifty cents a lesson to some of the clerks in the insurance office, and to bring his daughter with him. He said a little more knowledge of French would be very good for him when he took his conducted tours of Canadian Methodists to Switzerland; but I did not rise to this, and persuaded him to wait till I could get a more select class to meet, perhaps, at his own house, where a girl could more suitably attend. For, to tell the truth, some of my pupils had a habit of coming slightly drunk--or, as they called it, “with a jag on.” He, however, would not wait, so I lost two good pupils!... Dr. Withrow, patient little man of kindly disposition! His faded black frock-coat, his spectacles high on his puckered forehead, his carpet slippers, his tobacco-stained white beard, his sincere beliefs and his striped trousers of a pattern I have always since labelled mentally as “Methodist trousers”--it is a gentle little memory tucked away among unkinder ones, and I still hear him giving me my first and only lesson how to write. His paraphrase of “fatal facility” stays with me: “Fluency means dullness, unless the mind is packed with thought.” It stays with me because the conversation led to my asking if I might write an article for the monthly on the subject of Buddhism. Behind it lay an ever keener desire to write something on Hegel, whose philosophy I felt certain was based on some personal experience of genuine mystical kind. “From what point of view?” he asked, his forehead puckering with amazement. “That of belief,” I said, my mind bursting with an eager desire to impart information, if not also to convert. He passed his hand across his forehead, knocking the spectacles off. Then, catching them with a fumbling motion which betrayed his perturbation, he inquired: “But, of course, Mr. Blackwood, not your _own_?” The voice, the eyes, the whole attitude of the body made me realize he was prepared to be shocked, if not already shocked. “Yes,” I replied truthfully, “my own. I’ve been a Buddhist for a long time.”