With William Morris it was impossible, even for a “comrade,” to have any quarrel; his utter sincerity and great-heartedness forbad it. But broad as his geniality was, he used to seem rather nonplussed by such new ideas as vegetarianism in conjunction with teetotalism. “I’d like to ask you to have a drink,” he would say, after a meeting or lecture; and then would add, as in despair: “But you _won’t_ drink.” One of the memories of those years is the great meeting held in February, 1888, to welcome John Burns and Cunninghame Graham on their release from prison. Apart from my admiration for the heroes of the evening, I had some cause to remember the occasion, because, like many others who were present, I lost a valuable watch. This placed us in an embarrassing position; for having assembled to protest against the conduct of the police in the Square, we could not with dignity invoke their aid against the pickpockets. Quite the strangest personality among the socialists of that time was Dr. Edward Aveling. It is easy to set him down as a scoundrel, but in truth he was an odd mixture of fine qualities and bad; a double-dealer, yet his duplicities were the result less of a calculated dishonesty than of a nature in which there was an excess of the emotional and artistic element, with an almost complete lack of the moral. The character of Dubedat in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, _The Doctor’s Dilemma_, in some ways recalls that of Aveling, for nearly every one who had dealings with him, even those who were on the friendliest of terms, found themselves victimized, sooner or later, by his fraudulence in money matters. One’s feelings towards him might, perhaps, have been summed up in the remark made by one of the characters in _The Doctor’s Dilemma_: “I can’t help rather liking you, Dubedat. But you certainly are a thorough-going specimen.” Yet Aveling’s services to the socialist cause were perfectly sincere; and so, too, was his love of good literature, though it sometimes manifested itself in rather too sentimental a strain. He was a skilled reciter of poetry, and on one occasion when, with Eleanor Marx, he visited our Surrey cottage, he undertook to read aloud the last Act of Shelley’s _Prometheus Unbound_. As he gave effect to chorus and semi-chorus, and to the wonderful succession of spirit voices in that greatest of lyrical dramas, he trembled and shook in his passionate excitement, and when he had delivered himself of the solemn words of Demogorgon with which the poem concludes, he burst into a storm of sobs and tears. I used to regret that I had never heard his recitation, said to be his most effective performance, of Poe’s “The Bells”; for there was something rather uncanny and impish in his nature which doubtless made him a good interpreter of the weird.