My most intimate friend during this first visit to London was Symons, and I have to thank him for putting me on the track of many interesting people and experiences. I went to him with an introduction from Berlin, where he visited me later on. In 1892 he was living in Fentin Court in The Temple, Mr. George Moore being a close neighbor in Pump Court, I think. Both men took hold of my imagination very much, being the first English writers that I learned to know. With Moore I had only slight conversations, but I remember now that he evinced considerable interest in my "tramp material." Indeed, ten years after our first meeting he reminded me of an adventure which I, at one time, had related to him. Symons, on the other hand, I saw very frequently, and I might as well accuse him right away of being my literary god-father, if I may be said to deserve one. Whether he realized it at the time or not, it was the writer's atmosphere which he let me into, that made me ambitious to scribble on my own account. One day he told me that he had received fifteen pounds for an article for _The Fortnightly_. "Fifteen pounds!" I mumbled to myself on the way back to my lodgings. "Why, that sum would keep me here in London over a month." Later, in Berlin, I experimented for the first time with the effects of an article by me in a magazine. Symons' wonderful fifteen pounds were to blame. I sent the paper, a short account of the American tramp, to _The Contemporary_. It was accepted. In a few days I received page proofs of the article, and in the next number it was published. No youthful writer ever had his horizon more ambitiously widened than mine was when that article was printed and paid for. I assured the editor instanter that my tramp lore was inexhaustible, and begged him to consider other submissive efforts on my part. He intimated in his reply that submission was a fine quality, but that _The Contemporary_ did not confine its pages to trampology, and that his readers had had enough of that subject for the time being. * * * * * The little back room in the Crown Tavern, near Leicester Square, where a number of the young writers in London congregated at night, in my time, has given way to much more pretentious quarters. Symons and I had got into the habit of taking nightly walks about town, leading nowhere in particular at the start, but interrupted usually, for an hour at least, about half-past eleven at "The Crown." The place itself never meant much to me as a rendezvous because I have never been able to get enjoyment out of a back-parlor pushed up against a bar. Separate, each institution has its amenities but Englishmen seem fond of a combination of the sort mentioned.