l ship from aimless
and fatal wanderings, though of inclement weather and adverse
winds we had plenty.

For many long years Mr. Willson was the librarian of the New York
"World." In the afternoons he was too busy to see outsiders,
but, beginning with five o'clock in the afternoon until he went
home somewhere in the neighbourhood of midnight, he always was
glad to see his friends. He had a tiny little room of his own,
very near the top of the tremendous building, his one window
looking far above the roofs of the tallest houses in the
district. There he sat at his desk, generally in his shirt
sleeves, if the weather was at all warm, always busy with some
matter already printed, or going to be, a quiet, yet impressive
and dignified figure.

The elevated isolation, both figuratively and literally speaking,
in which T.E. Willson lived and worked, in the midst of the most
crowded thoroughfares of New York, always made me think of
Professor Teufelsdrockh on the attic floor of "the highest
house in the Wahngasse." The two had more than one point of
resemblance. They shared the loftiness of their point of view,
their sympathetic understanding of other folks, their loneliness,
and, above all, their patient, even humorous resignation to the
fact of this loneliness.

Yet in his appearance Mr. Willson was not like the great
Weissnichtwo philosopher. In fact, in the cast of his features
and in his ways, Mr. Willson never looked to me like a white man.
In British India I have known Brahmans of the better type exactly
with the same sallow complexion, same quick and observant brown
eye, same portly figure and same wide-awakeness and agility of
manner.

Last summer I heard, on good authority, that Mr. Willson had
thought himself into a most suggestive way of dealing with the
problems of matter and spirit, a way which, besides being
suggestive, bore a great resemblance to some theories of the same
nature, current in ancient India. Consequently Mr. Willson was
offered, for the first time in his life, a chance of expressing
his views on matter and spirit in as many articles and in as
extensive a shape as he chose. The way he received this tardy
recognition of the fact that he had something to say was highly
instructive. He did not put on airs of unrecognized greatness,
though, I own, the occasion was propitious; he did not say, "I
told you so;" he simply and frankly was glad, in, the most
childlike way.

And now that I