on the front door.

"I guess you young folks didn't need that introduction," observed Mrs.
Owen. "Don't forget to come and see me, Mr. Harwood."

CHAPTER XI

THE MAP ABOVE BASSETT'S DESK

Sometimes, in the rapid progress of their acquaintance, Allen Thatcher
exasperated Harwood, but more often he puzzled and interested him. It
was clear that the millionaire's son saw or thought he saw in Dan a
Type. To be thought a Type may be flattering or not; it depends upon the
point of view. Dan himself had no illusions in the matter. Allen wanted
to see and if possible meet the local characters of whom he read in the
newspapers; and he began joining Harwood in visits to the hotels at
night, hoping that these wonderful representatives of American democracy
might appear. Harwood's acquaintance was widening; he knew, by sight at
least, all the prominent men of the city and state, and after leaving
the newspaper he still spent one or two evenings a week lounging in the
hotel corridors. Tradition survived of taller giants before the days of
the contemporaneous Agamemnons. Allen asked questions about these and
mourned their passing. Harrison, the twenty-third President; Gresham, of
the brown eyes, judge and cabinet minister; Hendricks, the courtly
gentleman, sometime Vice-President; "Uncle Joe" McDonald and "Dan"
Voorhees, Senators in Congress, and loved in their day by wide
constituencies. These had vanished, but Dan and Allen made a pious
pilgrimage one night to sit at the feet of David Turpie, who had been a
Senator in two widely separated eras, and who, white and venerable, like
Aigyptos knew innumerable things.

The cloaked poets once visible in Market Street had vanished before our
chronicle opens, with the weekly literary journals in which they had
shone, but Dan was able to introduce Allen to James Whitcomb Riley in a
bookshop frequented by the poet; and that was a great day in Allen's
life. He formed the habit of lying in wait for the poet and walking with
him, discussing Keats and Burns, Stevenson and Kipling, and others of
their common admirations. One day of days the poet took Allen home with
him and read him a new, unpublished poem, and showed him a rare
photograph of Stevenson and the outside of a letter just received from
Kipling, from the uttermost parts of the world. It was a fine thing to
know a poet and to speak with him face to face,--particularly a poet who
sang of his own soil as Allen wished to know i