Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/176



When I think of the beginning of that period my thought goes back to an afternoon in New York, when, sitting in the editorial rooms of McClure's Magazine, Lincoln Steffens said to me:

"I'm going to do a series of articles for the magazine on municipal government."

"And what do you know about municipal government?" I asked in the tone a man may adopt with his friend.

"Nothing," he replied. "That's why I'm going to write about it."

We smiled in the pleasure we both had in his fun, but we did not talk long about municipal government as we were to do in the succeeding years; we had more interesting subjects to discuss just then.

I had been on a holiday to New England with my friend John D. Barry, and had just come from Maine where I had spent a week at Kittery Point, in the delight of long summer afternoons in the company of Mr. William Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say, my reverence for him, I had gone there to see. He had introduced me to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less in intensity I am sure than those with which Moses came down out of Mount Horeb. And Steffens and I celebrated them and their writings and that quality of right-mindedness they both got into their writings, and we had our joy in their perfect Americanism. The word had a