I went of course, and I went as well to Golden Rule Park and to Golden Rule Hall, and there was 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 and Emerson, who expressed his philosophy fully, or as fully as one man can express anything for another, and it was not long before Jones discovered an unusual facility for expressing himself, both with his voice and with his pen. The letters he wrote to the men in his shops--putting them in their pay-envelopes--are models of simplicity and sincerity, which show a genuine culture and have that beauty which is the despair of conscious art.[A] He had just learned of Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and he committed it to memory, or got it into his memory somehow, so that he would recite stanzas of it to anyone. He read Burns, too, with avidity, and I can see him now standing on the platform in one of his meetings, snapping his fingers as he recited: A fig for those by law protected! Liberty’s a glorious feast! But it was Walt Whitman whom he loved most, and his copy of “Leaves of Grass” was underscored in heavy lines with a red pencil until nearly every striking passage in the whole work had become a rubric. When anything struck him, he would have to come and tell me of it; sometimes he would not wait, but would call me up on the telephone and read it to me. I remember that occasion when his voice, over the wire, said: “Listen to this [and he read]: “The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair, redeeming sins past and to come, Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery.”