Pfeiffer recalls that “one Saturday night, under the influence of reading from the Vedic Hymns, and a talk on astronomy, we went up on the roof of our boarding-place, and observed a complete revolution of the starry heavens, from dusk to dawn.  We drifted into talk, ... and when we finally descended to our beds on Sunday morning, we found ourselves drenched to the skin from the drizzling dew.  We never forgot that experience, but we never repeated it either.”

His political interests brought Lane into the Reform Club where Progress and Poverty, Henry George’s new book, was the center for discussion upon the whole problem of the distribution of taxation.  Lane and Henry George established a cordial friendship.

John Crawford Burns says that in 1889 “Lane’s chief hero was Cleveland, and his oracle Godkin, of the evening post”—­later, the nation.  “When I knew him in New York he represented a San Francisco newspaper, the chronicle, I think, as correspondent.  He was not whole-heartedly in sympathy with his proprietor, nor indeed with the sensational aspect of journalism, and he always scoffed at the idea of newspaper writers constituting a modern priesthood.  He laughingly justified his association with the chronicle by saying he gave tone to it.  For this and other services, he received, I think, two thousand dollars a year, which even thirty years ago did not admit of luxury and riotous living.”

Lane’s whole stay in New York was less than two years in length, but the vital ideas that he shared with disinterested minds made of this period the seed-bed for future intellectual growth.

In 1891, in spite of the delights of personal friendships, in New York, Lane grew increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of newspaper corresponding.  He wanted a paper of his own, in which he could express without reserve the ideals of social and political betterment with which his mind was teeming.  In this mood, the first acclaim of the rapid growth of the pioneer towns of the far Northwest reached him.  He saw in this his opportunity, and acted quickly and decisively.  He gathered together his own savings, borrowed from his friend, Sidney Mezes, a few more thousand dollars and went to Tacoma, Washington, to buy the Tacoma Evening News.

As soon as the transfer was well made, Lane threw himself enthusiastically into the politics of the new town, already suffering from boss rule.  By his editorials he succeeded in stirring up the City Hall, and drove into Alaskan exile the Chief of Police—­who, by the way, was said to have become immensely rich in Alaska while Lane’s paper was running into bankruptcy in Tacoma.  But Lane’s misadventure was not wholly due to his civic virtue.  He had “bought in” at just the moment when the instruments were tuning up for the prelude to the great panic crash of 1893.  Tacoma, and the whole Northwest, had been mainly developed by casual investments of speculative Eastern capital, and this capital, sensitive to change, was being withdrawn to meet home needs.  Investors, to protect real interests, were willing to sacrifice their “little Western flyers,” at almost any discount.