I can never forget the sense of admiring regard which I experienced when in Genoa, while he and I were about to enter our banker’s together, he slipped upon a bit of banana peeling, bruising his knee and destroying his trouser leg.  I should have indulged in profane allusions to the person who had thoughtlessly thrown the peeling upon the ground if by some mischance the accident had happened to me.  Carson, however, did nothing of the sort, but treated me to a forcible abstract consideration of the unthinking habits of the masses.

The unknown individual who was responsible for the accident did not enter into the question; no one was consigned to everlasting torture in the deepest depths of purgatory; a calm, dispassionate presentation of an abstraction was all that greeted my ears.  The practice of thoughtlessness was condemned as a thing entirely apart from the practitioner, and as a tendency needing correction.  Inwardly, I know he swore; outwardly, he was as serene as though nothing untoward had happened to him.  It was then that I came to admire Carson.  Before that he had my affectionate regard in fullest measure, but now admiration for his deeper qualities set in, and it has in no sense diminished as time has passed.  Once, and once only, have I known him to depart from his philosophical demeanor, and that one departure was, I think, justified by the situation, since it was the culminating point of a series of aggravations, to fail to yield to which would have required a more than human strength.

The incident to which I refer was in connection with a fine organ, which at large expense Carson had had built in his house, for, like all philosophers, Carson has a great fondness for music, and is himself a musician of no mean capacity.  I have known him to sit down under a parlor-lamp and read over the score of the “Meistersinger” just as easily as you or I would peruse one of the lighter novels of the day.  This was one of his refuges.  When his spirit was subjected to an extreme tension he relieved his soul by flying to the composers; to use his own very bad joke, when he was in need of composure he sought out the “composures.”  As time progressed, however, and the petty annoyances grew more numerous, the merely intellectual pleasure of the writings of Wagner and Handel and Mozart possibly failed to suffice, and an organ was contracted for.

“I enjoy reading the music,” said he as we sat and talked over his plan, “but sometimes—­very often, in fact—­I feel as if something ought to shriek, and I’m going to have an organ of my own to do it for me.”