on Robert Burns, but he hasna the balance o’ a dwinin’ teetotum . . .  Ye’ll understand, Mr Brand, that I keep my mouth shut in such company, and don’t express my own views more than is absolutely necessary.  I criticize whiles, and that gives me a name of whunstane common-sense, but I never let my tongue wag.  The feck o’ the lads comin’ the night are not the real workingman—­they’re just the froth on the pot, but it’s the froth that will be useful to you.  Remember they’ve heard tell o’ ye already, and ye’ve some sort o’ reputation to keep up.’

‘Will Mr Abel Gresson be here?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.  ‘Not yet.  Him and me havena yet got to the point o’ payin’ visits.  But the men that come will be Gresson’s friends and they’ll speak of ye to him.  It’s the best kind of introduction ye could seek.’

The knocker sounded, and Mr Amos hastened to admit the first comers.  These were Macnab and Wilkie:  the one a decent middle-aged man with a fresh-washed face and a celluloid collar, the other a round-shouldered youth, with lank hair and the large eyes and luminous skin which are the marks of phthisis.  ‘This is Mr Brand boys, from South Africa,’ was Amos’s presentation.  Presently came Niven, a bearded giant, and Mr Norie, the editor, a fat dirty fellow smoking a rank cigar.  Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, when he arrived, proved to be a pleasant young man in spectacles who spoke with an educated voice and clearly belonged to a slightly different social scale.  Last came Tombs, the Cambridge ’professor, a lean youth with a sour mouth and eyes that reminded me of Launcelot Wake.

‘Ye’ll no be a mawgnate, Mr Brand, though ye come from South Africa,’ said Mr Norie with a great guffaw.

‘Not me.  I’m a working engineer,’ I said.  ’My father was from Scotland, and this is my first visit to my native country, as my friend Mr Amos was telling you.’

The consumptive looked at me suspiciously.  ’We’ve got two—­three of the comrades here that the cawpitalist Government expelled from the Transvaal.  If ye’re our way of thinking, ye will maybe ken them.’

I said I would be overjoyed to meet them, but that at the time of the outrage in question I had been working on a mine a thousand miles further north.

Then ensued an hour of extraordinary talk.  Tombs in his sing-song namby-pamby University voice was concerned to get information.  He asked endless questions, chiefly of Gilkison, who was the only one who really understood his language.  I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep.  He was engaged in venting some private academic spite against society, and I thought that in a revolution he would be the class of lad I would personally conduct to the nearest lamp-post.  And all the while Amos and Macnab and Niven carried on their own conversation about the affairs of their society, wholly impervious to the tornado raging around them.