“Oh, you mean Mr. Spalton?”

“Yes.”

“That’s him ... there ... choppin’ wood.”

There was a young man and an older one, both chopping wood, in the back of a building, but in fairly open view.

I walked to where they worked with both inward and outward trepidation, for, to me, Spalton was one of the world’s great men.

Just as I reached the spot, the younger of the two threw down his axe.

“So long, Dad! now I’ll go into the shop and tend to those letters.”

I stood in the presence of the great Roderick Spalton himself, the man who, in his Brief Visits to the Homes of Famous Folk, had written more meatily and wisely than any American author since Emerson ... the man whose magazine called The Dawn, had rendered him an object of almost religious veneration and worship to thousands of Americans whose spirits reached for something more than the mere piling of dollars one on the other....

I stood before him, visibly overwhelmed.  It was evident that my silent hero-worship was sweet to him.  He bespoke me gently and courteously.

“So you want to become an Eoite?”

“Yes,” I whispered, bending my gaze humbly before his.

“And what is your name, my dear boy.”

“John Gregory, Master!”

“What have you brought with you? where is your baggage?”

“I—­I lost my baggage ... all I have with me is a-a r-razor.”

He leaned his head back and laughed joyously.  His lambent brown eyes glowed with humour.  I liked the man.

“Yes, we’ll give you a job—­Razorre!” he assured me, calling me by the nickname which clung to me during my stay....

“Take that axe and show me what you can do.”

I caught up the axe and fell to with enthusiasm.  The gospel of the dignity and worth of labour that he preached thrilled in me.  It was the first time I ever enjoyed working....

As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me for years—­as if I, too, were Somebody.

There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant, clever epigram.  For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of his best.  For the first time I saw what human language is for.  I thought of Goethe at Weimar ...  Wilde’s clever conversation in London....

Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment, instead of the environment of modern, commercial America—­the spirit of which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....

Modern, commercial America—­where we proudly make a boast of lack of culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed, makes one’s hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive.

* * * * *