He put the book into my hands; two or three of the leaves were turned down, and on each page so marked was a passage scored in pencil. The lines would have arrested my eye even, had a greater mind than my own not selected them. “_A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke._” “_Tied wrist to bar for their red iniquitee._” “_To do butcher work_” (he is speaking of war) “_yer don’t want genlemen, ’cept to lead._” “_I got the gun-barrels red-hot and fetched the whipcord out of the cupboard, while the other man held the screaming, writhing thing down upon the floor._” “_Under whose_ (speaking of God) _awful hand we hold dominion over palm and pine._” I have no space to quote a longer passage of verse, evidently intended to be sung to a banjo, and describing the emotions of the author in a fit of delirium tremens when he suffered from the hallucination that a red-hot brass monkey was himself attempting song. The poet showed no jealousy of the animal. There was the full, hearty Anglo-Saxon friendship for a comrade and even for a rival, and I met the same tone again on a further page in the line: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” I looked up at Mr. Caliban and said: “Well?”:--for these short phrases are often the most emphatic. “Well,” said Dr. Caliban, “that man must not be allowed to go under. He must be made, and we must make him.” I said that such a man could not fail to pierce through and conquer. He seemed the very salt and marrow of all that has made us great. Dr. Caliban laid his hand in a fatherly way upon my shoulder and said: “You are still young; you do not know how long fame may take to find a man, if the way is not pointed out to her; and if she takes too long, sometimes he dies of a broken heart.” It was a noble thought in one who had known Fame almost from the very day when, as a lad of 22 years old, he had stood up in the chapel at Barking Level and answered the preacher with the words, “Lord, here am I.” Dr. Caliban continued in a few simple words to convince me that my foolish pride alone stood between this young genius and the fame he deserved. He pointed out what a weight would lie upon my mind were that poet some day to become famous, and to be able to say when I presented myself at his receptions: “Get ye hence: I know ye not!” He added the awful words that death might find us at any moment, and that then we should have to answer, not for our reasons or our motives, but for the things we have done, and for the things we have left undone. He added that he would regard a visit to this new writer as overtime work, and that he was ready to pay my expenses, including cab fares to and from the station. He ended with an appeal which would have convinced one less ready to yield: a magnificent picture of the Empire and of the Voice for which it had waited so long. * * * * *