characteristics of the region in which it lay, its rivers, lakes, parks and adjacent places and spots of interest (what rambles we took!), as well as its newest and finest things architecturally.  Nor did any one ever take a keener interest in the current intellectual resources of a city—­any city in which he happened to be—­its museums, libraries, old bookstores, newspapers, magazines, and I know not what else.  It was he who first took me into Leary’s bookstore in Philadelphia, descanting with his usual gusto on its merits.  Then and lastly he was keenly and wisely interested in various currents of local politics, society and finance, although he always considered the first a low mess, an arrangement or adjustment of many necessary things among the lower orders.  He seemed to know or sense in some occult way everything that was going on in those various realms.  His mind was so full and rich that merely to be with him was a delight.  He gushed like a fountain, and yet not polemically, of all he knew, heard, felt, suspected.  His thoughts were so rich at times that to me they were more like a mosaic of variegated and richly colored stones and jewels.  I felt always as though I were in the presence of a great personage, not one who was reserved or pompous but a loose bubbling temperament, wise beyond his years or day, and so truly great that perhaps because of the intensity and immense variety of his interests he would never shine in a world in which the most intensive specialization, and that of a purely commercial character, was the grand role.

And yet I always felt that perhaps he might.  He attracted people of all grades so easily and warmly.  His mind leaped from one interest to another almost too swiftly, and yet the average man understood and liked him.  While in a way he contemned their mental states as limited or bigoted, he enjoyed the conditions under which they lived, seemed to wish to immerse himself in them.  And yet nearly all his thoughts were, from their point of view perhaps, dangerous.  Among his friends he was always talking freely, honestly, of things which the average man could not or would not discuss, dismissing as trash illusion, lies or the cunning work of self-seeking propagandists, most of the things currently accepted as true.

He was constantly commenting on the amazing dullness of man, his prejudices, the astonishing manner in which he seized upon and clung savagely or pathetically to the most ridiculous interpretations of life.  He was also forever noting that crass chance which wrecks so many of our dreams and lives,—­its fierce brutalities, its seemingly inane indifference to wondrous things,—­but never in a depressed or morbid spirit; merely as a matter of the curious, as it were.  But if any one chanced to contradict him he was likely to prove liquid fire.  At the same time he was forever reading, reading, reading—­history, archaeology, ethnology, geology, travel, medicine, biography, and descanting on the wonders and idiosyncrasies