At the beginning of their friendship, in 1889, Curt Pfeiffer himself was only nineteen years old, a youth whose family had come from Holland and Germany. He appeared in the boarding-house on 32nd near Broadway, where Burns lived, fresh from three months at the Paris Exposition, a vacation that had followed a course of scientific study at Zurich, Switzerland. The wonders of Paris, a-glitter with the blaze of undreamed-of electrical beauty, and the greater wonder of the scientific discoveries and speculations, of the eighties, as taught at the University of Zurich, gave the young traveler an instant place among the others. Because of his love for exact statement and his scientific approach in discussion, young as he was, he contributed something very real to the group whose chief preoccupation--aside from the joy of living- was with art, government, and literature. They read separately, and when a book seemed intolerably good to the discoverer, he brought it in and insisted on their reading parts of it together. Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns, Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on primitive law, and Emerson! The relation of the men was almost impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life. Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole, sharper angles of mental refraction--breaking the ray of truth they sought into more of its component colors. Pfeiffer recalls that "one Saturday night, under the influence of reading from the Vedic Hymns, and a talk on astronomy, we went up on the roof of our boarding-place, and observed a complete revolution of the starry heavens, from dusk to dawn. We drifted into talk, ... and when we finally descended to our beds on Sunday morning, we found ourselves drenched to the skin from the drizzling dew. We never forgot that experience, but we never repeated it either." His political interests brought Lane into the Reform Club where Progress and Poverty, Henry George's new book, was the center for discussion upon the whole problem of the distribution of taxation. Lane and Henry George established a cordial friendship. John Crawford Burns says that in 1889 "Lane's chief hero was Cleveland, and his oracle Godkin, of the EVENING POST"--later, the NATION. "When I knew him in New York he represented a San Francisco newspaper, the CHRONICLE, I think, as correspondent. He was not whole-heartedly in sympathy with his proprietor, nor indeed with the sensational aspect of journalism, and he always scoffed at the idea of newspaper writers constituting a modern priesthood. He laughingly justified his association with the CHRONICLE by saying he gave tone to it. For this and other services, he received, I think, two thousand dollars a year, which even thirty years ago did not admit of luxury and riotous living."