This early reading of Dickens may have helped to develop his own quaint, rich humour. Will Crooks often reminds one of Charles Dickens. He knows the Londoner of to-day, his oddities, whimsicalities, his trials, humours, and sorrows, as thoroughly as Dickens knew the Londoner of fifty years ago. Many a time I have journeyed with him down to his home in East London, after he had finished a hard day's work in Parliament or on the London County Council, possibly having been defeated on some public question in a way that would make many men despair; and yet how easily he has put aside all the worries and work, and made the journey delightful by his unfailing fund of Cockney anecdotes. He is one of the rare story-tellers you meet with in a lifetime. The charm, too, of all his stories is that they never relate to what he has read, but always to what he has heard or observed himself. Some unknown friend at Yarmouth, who doubtless had heard him speak, seems to have been impressed by this ready way he has of taking his illustrations from the common things around him. Under the initials A. H. S. he sent the following "Limerick" to _London Opinion_:-- We smile when he's funny, or witty, We yawn when he's wise: more's the pity, For this best of the "Crooks" Draws from life, not from books, When he pleads for the people or city. After Dickens the lad discovered Scott. "It was an event in my life when, in an old Scotch magazine, I read a fascinating criticism of 'Ivanhoe.' Nothing would satisfy me until I had got the book; and then Scott took a front place among my favourite authors. "I was in my teens then, reading everything I could lay hands on. I used to follow closely public events in the newspapers. Not long ago I met a man in a car with whom I remonstrated for some rude behaviour to the passengers. He looked at me in amazement when I called him by his name. "'Why,' he said, 'you must be that boy Will Crooks I knew long ago. Do you know what I remember about you? I can see you now tossing your apron off in the dinner-hour and squatting down in the workshop with a paper in your hand.'" Crooks was still an apprentice when, as he describes it, the great literary event of his life occurred. "On my way home from work one Saturday afternoon I was lucky enough to pick up Homer's 'Iliad' for twopence at an old bookstall. After dinner I took it upstairs--we were able to afford an upstairs room by that time--and read it lying on the bed. What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury to a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs and gods of ancient Greece." The lad's imagination was also fired by "The Pilgrim's Progress."