nds. I was beside myself with happy pride.

"This is a glorious country. You must take me for a long walk this
afternoon. I want to tramp away out to that purple bluff toward the
South East."

"We call it Azure Mound."

"Has it any historical interest?"

"--don't know! It might have. Richard Realf, the poet, camped out about
here, on the heights with his men, during the Quantrell Raid, And there
are one or two old settlers in Laurel who were members of John Brown's
company."

Baxter was a good walker. He made me think of Shelley as he traipsed
along, indefatigably talking away, his voice high-pitched and shrill ...
unburdening his mind of all his store of ideas....

His head was much too large for his body ... a strong head ... strong
Roman nose ... decisive chin, but with too deep a cleft in it. His mouth
was loose and cruel--like mine. His face was as smooth as a boy's or
woman's ... on each cheek a patch here and there of hair, like the hair
on an old maid's face.

More than a year later his wife confided to me that "Pennie," as she
dubbed him affectionately, could not grow a beard ... and she laughed at
his solemnly shaving once a week, as a matter of ritual, anyhow....

Each of us went with bent knees as we walked, as if wading against a
rising tide of invisible opposition.

I discoursed of a new religion--a non-ascetic one based on the
individual's spiritual duty to enjoy life--that I meditated inaugurating
as soon as I left college. He advised me to wait till I was at least
Christ's age when he began his public ministry, thirty-five or six. His
face lit with frolic....

Then, in rapid transition, he soberly discoursed on the religion he
himself had in mind ... instinctively I knew it would not do to make
sport of his dreams, as he had of mine.

Harry Varden was right. Where he himself was involved in the slightest,
Baxter absolutely had no sense of humour.

Baxter told me of the great men he had met on intimate terms, in the
wider world of life and letters I had not yet attained to ... of
Roosevelt, who invited him to dinner at the White House ... and of how,
at that dinner attended by many prominent men ... by several Senators
... Roosevelt had unlimbered his guns of attack on many men in public
office.... "Senator So-and-so was the biggest crook in American public
life.... Senator Thing-gumbob was the most sinister force American
politics had ever seen ... belonged to the Steel Trust from his sho