ought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott
House, William Morris's house at Hammersmith, and to the debates held
there upon Sunday evenings by the Socialist League. I was soon of the
little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at these
suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with
Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less constantly
Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the Museum of Cambridge, and perhaps
but once or twice Hyndman the Socialist and the Anarchist Prince
Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more or less educated
workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn.
I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more than my
share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in one evening than
he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred
Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt, who had
wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long
unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung
Rossetti's _Pomegranate_, a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall
and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had
said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their
shoes off when they entered a house and were most in place upon a tent
floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old man
content at last to gather beautiful things rather than to arrange a
beautiful house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice, and there alone all
my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's
pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from
Chaucer by Burne-Jones; but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a
little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps and with
little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as a boy,
in books belonging to my father, the third volume of _The Earthly
Paradise_, and _The Defence of Guenevere_, which pleased me less, but had
not opened either for a long time. _The Man Who Never Laughed Again_ had
seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of
preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it, and put me altogether out
of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I
read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as y