John Crawford Burns, who was slightly older than the rest, a purist, and something of a “dour Scot,” was a man of conservative and cultivated tastes and the dean of the group.  He was in a business house that imported linens, and lived in a “glorious room with two outside windows, and ample seating capacity,” so the friends often met there and learned something of Gothic architecture and of the abominations of slang, in spite of themselves.  With Burns, and of his firm, was Brydon Lamb, “also of Scotch descent, but born in America, a delightful combination of strength, sweetness and light.  The simple grace of his manner, his unhurried speech, his urbanity, captivated us all.  We loved him for what he was, and we considered him our arbiter elegantiarum” Of Lane at that period the same friend writes, “I remember a fine, stocky, muscular presence with a striking head.  A massive, commanding man, he was, a persuasive and compelling leader.”  But none of the men had any sense of anything but complete friendly, boyish equality.  “Lane was,” Pfeiffer says, “interested in human beings, not problems, excepting as their solution might be made serviceable to the needs of individuals.  He had great tolerance for the most unusual opinions.  I don’t think Lane ever had much interest in the dogmas of science, religion, or philosophy; he lived by the spirit of them, that cannot be expressed in formulae.  He had the peculiar sensitiveness of a poet for words, for colors and sounds, and for moral beauty, and blended with it the statesman’s observant awareness of conditions in the world of affairs.”

At the beginning of their friendship, in 1889, Curt Pfeiffer himself was only nineteen years old, a youth whose family had come from Holland and Germany.  He appeared in the boarding-house on 32nd near Broadway, where Burns lived, fresh from three months at the Paris Exposition, a vacation that had followed a course of scientific study at Zurich, Switzerland.  The wonders of Paris, a-glitter with the blaze of undreamed-of electrical beauty, and the greater wonder of the scientific discoveries and speculations, of the eighties, as taught at the University of Zurich, gave the young traveler an instant place among the others.  Because of his love for exact statement and his scientific approach in discussion, young as he was, he contributed something very real to the group whose chief preoccupation—­aside from the joy of living-was with art, government, and literature.

They read separately, and when a book seemed intolerably good to the discoverer, he brought it in and insisted on their reading parts of it together.  Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns, Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on primitive law, and Emerson!  The relation of the men was almost impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life.  Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole, sharper angles of mental refraction—­breaking the ray of truth they sought into more of its component colors.