FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES 77 



at breakfast, one has to be silent or talk. He was 

 deeply interested in the trend of thought in the 

 Mother Country, but he was also very human, 

 and when his rather assertive reference to certain 

 irksome conditions obliged me to say that lots of 

 miserable old prejudices and habits had dropped off 

 out of sheer decay, and if it was not exactly general 

 it had at least ceased to be criminal for even the 

 clergy to use their power to think, I am not sure 

 that he wasn't just a little disappointed. Honest 

 emigrants from the Mother Country know that they 

 leave much behind that softens and sweetens life. 

 He loved the North- West as being his very own 

 country in the finest sense of the term, but he 

 must have missed his intellectual peers badly, and 

 although I feel sure he would never have acknow- 

 ledged even to himself the most far-off touch of 

 heim web, he was deeply conscious of the unseverable 

 quality of the home-tie which like the last string 

 of the lyre in Watts' " Hope " won't snap, because it 

 can't. He was a keen admirer of Herbert Spencer, 

 and on one occasion when he was driving me inch 

 by inch into a cul-de-sac I propped up my defence 

 on a passage of Emerson : " Ah ! Emerson," he 

 said, " but you know I am afraid he permitted 

 himself to be drawn just a little into the clouds ; 

 follow Herbert Spencer, the one, who has dared to 

 think with all his mind, and striven to think with 

 all his might." I refused to acknowledge the 

 limitation implied in " the one" but I felt that to 

 name others would be only to invest them in his 

 mind with the pall of clouds. Nor was it the 

 smallest use shouting " clouds of glory." His eyes 

 had easily crossed the horizon, but he had vowed 



