ned to admit the first comers.
These were Macnab and Wilkie: the one a decent middle-aged man with a
fresh-washed face and a celluloid collar, the other a round-shouldered
youth, with lank hair and the large eyes and luminous skin which are
the marks of phthisis. 'This is Mr Brand boys, from South Africa,' was
Amos's presentation. Presently came Niven, a bearded giant, and Mr
Norie, the editor, a fat dirty fellow smoking a rank cigar. Gilkison of
the Boiler-fitters, when he arrived, proved to be a pleasant young man
in spectacles who spoke with an educated voice and clearly belonged to
a slightly different social scale. Last came Tombs, the Cambridge
'professor, a lean youth with a sour mouth and eyes that reminded me of
Launcelot Wake.

'Ye'll no be a mawgnate, Mr Brand, though ye come from South Africa,'
said Mr Norie with a great guffaw.

'Not me. I'm a working engineer,' I said. 'My father was from Scotland,
and this is my first visit to my native country, as my friend Mr Amos
was telling you.'

The consumptive looked at me suspiciously. 'We've got two--three of the
comrades here that the cawpitalist Government expelled from the
Transvaal. If ye're our way of thinking, ye will maybe ken them.'

I said I would be overjoyed to meet them, but that at the time of the
outrage in question I had been working on a mine a thousand miles
further north.

Then ensued an hour of extraordinary talk. Tombs in his sing-song
namby-pamby University voice was concerned to get information. He asked
endless questions, chiefly of Gilkison, who was the only one who really
understood his language. I thought I had never seen anyone quite so
fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in
him like a demented sheep. He was engaged in venting some private
academic spite against society, and I thought that in a revolution he
would be the class of lad I would personally conduct to the nearest
lamp-post. And all the while Amos and Macnab and Niven carried on their
own conversation about the affairs of their society, wholly impervious
to the tornado raging around them.

It was Mr Norie, the editor, who brought me into the discussion.

'Our South African friend is very blate,' he said in his boisterous
way. 'Andra, if this place of yours wasn't so damned teetotal and we
had a dram apiece, we might get his tongue loosened. I want to hear
what he's got to say about the war. You told me this morning he was
sound in the fa