When the library closed we adjourned for beer and a smoke, and often we would argue long about what we had been reading. Joe had little use for the stuff I liked. Beauty and form were nothing to him, it was "the meat" he was after. My mother's idols he laid low. "The first part was big," he said one night of a recent English novel. "But the last part was the kind of thing that poor old Thackeray might have done." In an instant I was up in arms, for to my mother and me the author of "Pendennis" had been like a great lovable patron saint, a refuge from all we abhorred in the harbor. To slight him was a sacrilege. But reverence to Joe Kramer was a thing unknown. "Show me," he said, in reply to my outburst, "a single thing he ever wrote that wasn't sentimental bosh!" And we went at it hammer and tongs. It was so in all our talks. Nothing was too sacred. Joe always insisted on "being shown." He had a keen liking but little respect for the nation built by our fathers. From his own father's tragedy, caused by graft, his own hard struggles in the West and the Populist doctrines he had imbibed, he had come East with a deep conviction that "things in this country are one big mess with the Constitution sitting on top." And when the term "muckraker" came into use, I remember his deep satisfaction. "Now I know my name," he said. He was equally hard on the church. How he kicked against our compulsory chapel. "Broad, isn't it, scientific," he growled, "to yank a man out of bed every morning, throw him into his seat in chapel and tell him, 'Here. This is what you believe. Be good now, take your little dose and then you can go to breakfast.'" "I'm no atheist," he remarked. "I'm only a poor young fellah who asks, 'Say, Mister, if you _are_ up there why is it that no big scientist has brains enough to see you?'" "Look here, J. K., that isn't so!" "Isn't it? Show me!" And we would start in. I had a deep repugnance for his whole materialistic view. But I liked the way he jarred me.