In my fourth years as an undergraduate I was editor of the college magazine, and had to administer a prize of ten dollars for the best poem contributed. The poems came in, and I took them to Ned. Ned didn't recommend an award. What he did was to put his finger on one poem and say, "Now this one----it has some feeling, some sensitivity, some sense of structure. But----well, damn it all, it isn't worth money." I have never had a profound insight into literary values, and I was lucky to have it so early. As a graduate student I was his assistant when he became the first editor of the Canadian Poetry Magazine. I am not saying that what was printed in those opening issues was imperishable, but it was certainly the best of what we got. What impressed me was the number of people ( it was the depression, and the magazine paid a dollar or two) who tried to get themselves or their friends in by assuming that Ned was a soft touch. In some ways he was, but he was not compromising the standards of poetry to be so: poetry was something he took too seriously. And, as I realized more clearly later, friendship was also something he too seriously to compromise. People who thought him a soft touch were never his friends. He couldn't be impulsively, even quixotically, generous to bums and down-and-outs, and I think I understand why. His goodwill was not benevolence, not a matter of being a sixty-year-old smiling public man. It was rather an enthusiasm that one was alive, rooted in a sense of childlike wonder at human existence and the variety of personality. This feeling was so genuine and so deep in him that I think he felt rather guilty when approached by someone towards whom he was actually indifferent.