By good luck he went to Henley, who was not free to do
much for the paper save give it his advice, offer it those of his Young
Men whom he could spare, and take under his wing the new Young Men it
invented for itself. When new enthusiasts fell into Henley's train, it
was never long before they followed him to Buckingham Street on Thursday
nights.

I could scarcely label as anybody's Young Man Iwan-Mueller, huge, half
Russian, half English, all good comrade, who had come up from Manchester
and the editorship of a leading paper there to be Cust's Assistant
Editor. He was nearly Henley's contemporary, but he did not, for such a
trifle as age, let any one of Henley's Young Men exceed him in devotion,
and his laugh became the unfailing accompaniment of Henley's talk, so
much so that I am convinced if Henley still leads the talk in the land
beyond the grave, Iwan-Mueller still punctuates it with the big bracing
laugh that was as big as himself.

[Illustration: Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
IWAN-MUeLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS]

At the other extreme, younger than the youngest of the Young Men he
joined, came George W. Steevens, fresh from Oxford, Balliol Prize
Scholar, shy and carrying it off, in the Briton's way, with appalling
rudeness and more appalling silence. I remember J., upon whose nerves as
well as mine this silence got, taking me apart one Thursday evening
to tell me that if that young Oxford prig was too superior to talk to
anybody, why then he was too superior to come to us at all, and he must
be made to understand it. Eventually he learned to talk, with us
anyway--he was always a silent man with most people. And I got to know
him well, to like him, to admire him,--to respect him too through the
long summer when his friends were doing their best to dissuade him from
his proposed marriage with a woman many years older than he. The men of
the _National Observer_ and the _Pall Mall_ were such keen fighters that
they could not be kind or sentimental--and they grew maudlinly
sentimental over Steevens's engagement--without a fight for it. They
thought he was making a mistake, forgetting that it was his business,
not theirs, if he was. He fought alone against them, but he held his
place like a man and won. Our Thursday nights had come to an end before
he went to America, to Germany, to Khartoum with Kitchener, to South
Africa, where he passed into the great silence that no protest of ours,
or any man's can break. If