By many competent critics, including no less a personage than Hon.

John Barclay, president of the National Provisions Company, this poem is deemed one of Mr.McHurdie's noblest achievements, ranking second only to the great song that gave him national fame." And it should be set down as an integral part of this narrative that John Barclay first read the verses "Love at Sunset" in the _Banner_, two weeks after the night of their composition, as he was finishing a campaign for the Fifth Parallel bonds.

He picked up the _Banner_ one evening at twilight in a house in Pleasant township, and seeing Watts' initials under some verses, read them at first mechanically, and then reread them with real zest, and so deeply did they move the man from the mooring of the campaign that seeing an accordion on the table of the best room in which he was waiting for supper, Barclay picked it up and fooled with it for half an hour.

It had been a dozen years since he had played an accordion, and the tunes that came into his fingers were old tunes in vogue before the war, and he thought of himself as an old man, though he was not yet twenty-five.

But the old tunes brought back his boyhood from days so remote that they seemed a long time past.