If in cold print to-day there is a slightly preposterous didactic quality in these remarks of this youthful character, it should be instantly noted as a tribute to the charm that was his that in the presence of so much handsomeness and grace, combined with so much flexibility of mind and agile humour, even this was an engaging thing. There was to Kilmer nothing whatever dry-as-dust about the erudite business of lexicography; instead his impressionable nature found among his co-workers a rich, a colourful, an exciting school of humanity. He glowed continually with affectionate amusement at the motley band of literary adventurers, intellectual soldiers of fortune, who apparently were his colleagues. One, the most motley perhaps of all (the long cherished dream of whose ancient bachelor life it was one day to write a popular song), touched, for the first time, I think, the deepest spring of his song--his profound and wide-ranging humanity. Some people ask: “What cruel chance Made Martin’s life so sad a story?” Martin? Why, he exhaled romance, And wore an overcoat of glory. II And then, lo! the aesthete became a churchman. After a couple of years or so of lexicographic employment, work on the dictionary was completed, and Kilmer entered what, with immense gusto, he described as “religious journalism.” He became literary editor of _The Churchman_. He had completed a very thorough course in uptown New York apartment house life (living, I think, in rapid succession in some half dozen specimens of “the great stone box cruelly displayed severe against the pleasant arc of sky”); and now removing to the suburban village of Mahwah, New Jersey, in the Ramapo foothills, he entered upon his career as one of the world’s most accomplished commuters. He used to say, with a spacious gesture of the arm and a haughty inflation of the chest, that it was no life at all, no life at all, for a man not to swing around an orbit of at least sixty miles a day between his office and his home. His home, even so! I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home. What more exhilarating experience than the owning of a home! And one paid one’s installments on the building loan with the fine pride of a man exercising a noble prerogative. Yes, he often walked to Suffern along the Erie track, and meditated on “what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life,” That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife, A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet.