he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into
untimely pathos and indignation. And Denson hit me curiously hard
with one of his shafts. "Suppose," he said, "you found yourself
prime minister--"

I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little
ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the
huge machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was
perplexed!

And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and
smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands
that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the
cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive
talk with him.

"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.

Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and
again he came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your
learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children
suffer and die. They don't pick holes up north. They mean
business."

He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his
going to work in a factory when he was twelve--"when you Chaps were
all with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights
until he would fall asleep at his reading.

"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all