as something strange and special, but as
a ticketed specimen of this or that very familiar genus. The world has
ceased to be remarkable; and one tends to think more and more often of
the days when it was so very remarkable indeed.

I suppose that had I been thirty years older when first I knew him,
William would have seemed to me little worthier of attention than a
twopenny postage-stamp seems to-day. Yet, no: William really had some
oddities that would have caught even an oldster's eye. In himself he was
commonplace enough (as I, coeval though I was with him, soon saw). But
in details of surface he was unusual. In them he happened to be rather
ahead of his time. He was a socialist, for example. In 1890 there was
only one other socialist in Oxford, and he not at all an undergraduate,
but a retired chimney-sweep, named Hines, who made speeches, to which
nobody, except perhaps William, listened, near the Martyrs' Memorial.
And William wore a flannel shirt, and rode a bicycle--very strange
habits in those days, and very horrible. He was said to be (though he
was short-sighted and wore glasses) a first-rate 'back' at football;
but, as football was a thing frowned on by the rowing men, and coldly
ignored by the bloods, his talent for it did not help him: he was one of
the principal pariahs of our College; and it was rather in a spirit
of bravado, and to show how sure of myself I was, that I began, in my
second year, to cultivate his acquaintance.

We had little in common. I could not think Political Economy 'the most
exciting thing in the world,' as he used to call it. Nor could I
without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris'
interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young
socialist that he was, thought 'glorious.' He had begun to write an
Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of
verses. None of these pleased him, though to me they seemed very like
his master's. I can see him now, standing on his hearth-rug, holding his
MS. close to his short-sighted eyes, declaiming the verses and trying,
with many angular gestures of his left hand, to animate them--a tall,
broad, raw-boned fellow, with long brown hair flung back from his
forehead, and a very shabby suit of clothes. Because of his clothes and
his socialism, and his habit of offering beer to a guest, I had at first
supposed him quite poor; and I was surprised when he told me that he
had from his guardian (