The last of the three, like the Pedler, was a Socialist, but was very unlike his two companions as a man. My acquaintance among the Socialists had not gone far before I began to observe that I was meeting men who, whatever their mental vagaries, were craftsmen of no mean order. They were machinists and skilled workmen mostly, and some were workers in sweat-shops. All of them had known the full stress of the struggle for bread, but they were decidedly not the inefficients of their class, having fought their way to positions of some advantage in the general fight. Here, however, was an exception in this third “comrade,” and I marvelled at the rarity of his type. Incompetence was stamped on every feature. His long, lank, flabby figure, with its disjointed movements, suggested no virility. The hair grew thin and blonde from his head and from his colorless face, and his large, pale-blue eyes flitted in their movements, as though there were behind them not intelligence enough to hold them in fixed attention. The man’s emotions were boundless. He had, moreover, a gift of utterance, and, when he spoke in meeting, it was sheer feeling that expressed itself in words which were marvellously void of any sane concatenation. It was a psychological phenomenon, this public speech of his. We had premonitory warnings of it, for we could see him writhing in his seat when his emotions were aroused, and starting nervously until he had gained the floor, when a half-suppressed, general groan would greet the torrent of his sentences, which flowed directly from chaotic feeling which had never reached his mind. We four left the restaurant together, and walked on to Waverley Hall. I fell in with the Pedler, and from him I was glad to learn that the Poet was to read that afternoon his long-deferred paper on the “Opening of the Exposition Grounds on Sunday.” It was a little before the appointed hour when we reached the hall, but already there was promise of an uncommon meeting. The audience was larger than usual, the benches on both sides of the central aisle being well filled nearly to the door. The Pedler and I had some difficulty in finding seats near the front. More than ever marked was the atmosphere of keen alertness, which, from the first, had so attracted me in the gatherings of the Socialists. They might be futile, but their meetings were never dull. And, while they could not have been more orderly, they might easily have proved far less engaging than they were, had a saving sense of humor been more conspicuously a characteristic of the members.