"I am playing British chorus," was Meredith's rejoinder.
"Second chapter," said I. "There came the year of the Great Dock Strike. The casual labourer swarmed out of chaos, and struck for a sane, not to say 'civilised' method of hiring, and sixpence an hour."
"And the dock companies, or whatever they were, were not sane, and, also, they had n't a sixpence, they said"—thus Meredith.
"Which was absurd, Mr. Meredith, as you are on the point of adding," I went on. "We don't know how many thousands of men were thrown out of work. Nobody knows to this day, but here is what I am coming at; there were thousands of them, and there was great suffering in their families. Well, when I first saw Burns he was organising kitchens, and feeding women and children, and making ten speeches every twenty-four hours, and sleeping an hour or two when he could find time and a place to lie down. Some nights he did not sleep at all. The night before I met him he slept four hours in his clothes and boots. In three days he made thirty-six speeches; in three weeks he averaged ten speeches a day, out of doors. He is hoarse still, no wonder.
"I lost sight of him for a bit, and found him again on Tower Hill, speaking to a big crowd. His platform was a dray. When he stopped speaking and jumped down from the dray, I introduced myself to him, said I was mightily interested, and that I wanted to interview him.
"'All right,' said he; 'begin!'
"If he were not modest, I was. 'Not here,' said I, 'let's go where we can talk in quiet.' So I tucked him into a hansom and, followed by a yelling crowd which we soon left out of sight, we drove to a club of mine in the West End, where we had a long talk. The immediate results were—oh, well, some articles in which I tried to show the world the real John Burns."
"That was the discovery?" asked Meredith.
"Burns calls it so. He was no more modest about being discovered then than he is now. He has a way of telling you straight what he thinks, or what he 's at, or of telling you that he won't tell you."