The Committee of the Senate decided without any debate on the bill to report adversely to it.  I got them to reconsider their vote, and we will have a hearing at any rate before the bill is killed.  The Legislature is altogether for boodle. ...

Your book has been of the greatest assistance to me.  I virtually made my speech from it and left the book with the chairman of the Committee at his special request. ...  If it had come out a month sooner we would have stood fifty per cent better chance of getting the bill through, because the papers would have come to the front so much sooner and we would have been thirty days ahead with our bill.  I tell you I felt quite proud in addressing the distinguished legislature to refer to “my friend Wigmore’s book.” ...

San Francisco, May 10, 1889

...  I am coming nearer to you.  On Monday I leave to take up my residence in New York, as correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.  I do not know where I will be located, but mail addressed to me at the Hoffman House will reach me when I arrive, which will be in about ten days.

My purpose is to breathe a new atmosphere for a while so that I may broaden.  We must make arrangements soon to meet.  I want to know your New York reform friends. ...

New York, June 21, 1889

...  This lapse of a couple of weeks means that I have been enjoying the delights of a New York summer, in which only slaves work and many of these find refuge in suicide. ...

Not a single reformer, big or little, have I yet met.  Your friend Bishop [Footnote:  Joseph Bucklin Bishop, editor of Theodore Roosevelt and His Time.] I have not called on, though I have twice started to do so, and have been switched off. ...  I will go within a couple of days for the spirit must be revived.  One day early in this week I had an intense desire to visit you immediately and was almost on the verge of letting things go and rush off, but duty held me. ...

I see that Bellamy has captured Higginson, Savage, and others and that they are going to work over the Kinsley-Maurice business.  Well, I would to God it would work.  Something to make life happier and steadier for these poor women and men who toil and never get beyond a piece of meat and a cot!  There is justification here for a social-economic revolution and it will come, too, if things are not bettered.

If you have a stray thought let me know it and soon.

Your friend,

F. K. L.

Lane’s desire for stimulating companionship in New York was quickly gratified.  A spontaneous association of friendships, based upon a young delight in life and a vast curiosity of the mind, sprang up among a little group of men of very diverse types.  All were strangers in New York with no immediate home ties.  “Women played no part in our lives,” one of them recalls.  “We came together to discuss plays, poetry, politics, anything and everything—­the great actors, comic operas, the songs of the streets, science, politics.”  John Crawford Burns, Lane, Brydon Lamb, Curt Pfeiffer formed the nucleus of what spread out irregularly into larger groupings.