John Ware, an ancient and honorable son of the tribe of Nimrod, was the best of comrades.  The striking quality in Ware was his beautiful humanness, which had given him a peculiar hold upon men.  Thatcher was far from being a saint, but, like many other cheerful sinners in our capital, he had gone to church in the days when Ware occupied the First Congregational pulpit.  A good many years had passed since Ware had been a captain of cavalry, chasing Stuart’s boys in the Valley of Virginia, but he was still a capital wing shot.  A house-boat is the best place in the world for talk, and the talk in Thatcher’s boat, around the sheet-iron stove, was good those crisp November evenings.

On Sunday Ware tramped off to a country church, taking his companions with him.  It was too bad to miss the ducks, he said, but a day’s peace in the marshes gave them a chance to accumulate.  That evening he talked of Emerson, with whom he had spoken face to face in Concord in that whitest of houses.  We shouldn’t bring this into our pages if it hadn’t been that Ware’s talk in that connection interested Thatcher greatly.  And ordinarily Thatcher knew and cared less about Emerson than about the Vedic Hymns.  Allen was serenely happy to be smoking his pipe in the company of a man who had fought with Sheridan, heard Phillips speak, and talked to John Brown and Emerson.  When Ware had described his interview with the poet he was silent for a moment, then he refilled his pipe.

“It’s odd,” he continued, “but I’ve picked up copies of Emerson’s books in queer places.  Not so strange either; it seems the natural thing to find loose pages of his essays stuck around in old logging-camps.  I did just that once, when I was following Thoreau’s trail through the Maine woods.  Some fellow had pinned a page of ‘Compensation’ on the door of a cabin I struck one night when it was mighty good to find shelter,—­the pines singing, snowstorm coming on.  That leaf was pretty well weather-stained; I carried it off with me and had it framed—­hangs in my house now.  Another time I was doing California on horseback, and in an abandoned shack in the Sierras I found Emerson’s ’Poems’—­an old copy that somebody had thumbed a good deal.  I poked it out of some rubbish and came near making a fire of it.  Left it, though, for the next fellow.  I’ve noticed that if one thing like that happens to you there’s bound to be another.  Is that superstition, Thatcher?  I’m not superstitious,—­not particularly,—­but we’ve all got some of it in our hides.  After that second time—­it was away back in the seventies, when I was preaching for a spell in ’Frisco—­I kept looking for the third experience that I felt would come.”

“Oh, of course it did come!” cried Allen eagerly.

“Well, that third time it wasn’t a loose leaf torn out and stuck on a plank, or just an old weather-stained book; it was a copy that had been specially bound—­a rare piece of work.  I don’t care particularly for fine bindings, but that had been done with taste,—­a dark green,—­the color you get looking across the top of a pine wood; and it seemed appropriate.  Emerson would have liked it himself.”