Apropos of this same a little later—­to shock me, of course, as he well knew he could—­he assured me that in eating a dish of chop suey in a Chinese restaurant, a very low one, he had found and eaten a part of the little finger of a child, and that “it was very good—­very good, indeed.”

“Dog!” I protested.  “Swine!  Thou ghoula!” but he merely chuckled heartily and stuck to his tale!

But if I paint this side of him it is to round out his wonderful, to me almost incredible, figure.  Insisting on such things, he was still and always warm and human, sympathetic, diplomatic and cautious, according to his company, so that he was really acceptable anywhere.  Peter would never shock those who did not want to be shocked.  A minute or two or five after such a discourse as the above he might be describing some marvelously beautiful process of pollination among the flowers, the history of some medieval trade guild or gazing at a beautiful scene and conveying to one by his very attitude his unspoken emotion.

After spending about two or three years in Philadelphia—­which city came to reflect for me the color of Peter’s interests and mood—­he suddenly removed to Newark, having been nursing an arrangement with its principal paper for some time.  Some quarrel or dissatisfaction with the director of his department caused him, without other notice, to paste some crisp quotation from one of the poets on his desk and depart!  In Newark, a city to which before this I had paid not the slightest attention, he found himself most happy; and I, living in New York close at hand, felt that I possessed in it and him an earthly paradise.  Although it contained no more than 300,000 people and seemed, or had, a drear factory realm only, he soon revealed it to me in quite another light, because he was there.  Very swiftly he found a wondrous canal running right through it, under its market even, and we went walking along its banks, out into the woods and fields.  He found or created out of an existing boardinghouse in a back street so colorful and gay a thing that after a time it seemed to me to outdo that one of Philadelphia.  He joined a country club near Passaic, on the river of that name, on the veranda of which we often dined.  He found a Chinese quarter with a restaurant or two; an amazing Italian section with a restaurant; a man who had a $40,000 collection of rare Japanese and Chinese curios, all in his rooms at the Essex County Insane Asylum, for he was the chemist there; a man who was a playwright and manager in New York; another who owned a newspaper syndicate; another who directed a singing society; another who was president of a gun club; another who owned and made or rather fired pottery for others.  Peter was so restless and vital that he was always branching out in a new direction.  To my astonishment he now took up the making and firing of pottery for himself, being interested in reproducing various Chinese dishes and vases of great beauty,