ll night in to read 'em, an' soak in them,
when me brain's on fire, and I'm watch and watch, an' me broken spine
won't let me carry half a hundredweight of books about with me?"

Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to
modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him what
were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what were the
writers he preferred. His library, he told me, among other things
included, first and fore-most, a complete Byron. Next was a complete
Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume. A full hall-dozen
he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of Lecky, Winwood
Reade's _Martyrdom of Man_, several of Carlyle, and eight or ten of Zola.
Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a prime favourite.

He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently mad
from any madman I had ever encountered. I talked on with him about books
and bookmen. He was most universal and particular. He liked O. Henry.
George Moore was a cad and a four--flusher. Edgar Saltus' _Anatomy of
Negation_ was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck was a mystic frump.
Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen's _Ghosts_ was the stuff, though Ibsen
was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real goods. He preferred
Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but Gorky was the
best of the Russian boiling. John Masefield knew what he was writing
about, and Joseph Conrad was living too fat to turn out the stuff he
first turned out.

And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I had
ever heard. I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on sociology.
Yes, he was a Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no anarchist. On
the other hand, political action was a blind-alley leading to reformism
and quietism. Political socialism had gone to pot, while industrial
unionism was the logical culmination of Marxism. He was a direct
actionist. The mass strike was the thing. Sabotage, not merely as a
withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen destruction-of-profits policy,
was the weapon. Of course he believed in the propaganda of the deed, but
a man was a fool to talk about it. His job was to do it and keep his
mouth shut, and the way to do it was to shoot the evidence. Of course,
_he_ talked; but what of it? Didn't he have curvature of the spine? He
didn't care when he got his, and woe to the man who tried to give it to