“A scarab?  What’s a scarab?  I never heard of one,” I answered.

“A beetle, of course.  An Egyptian beetle.  You know what a beetle is, don’t you?  Well, those things burrowed in the earth, the mud of the Nile, at a certain period of their season to lay their eggs, and the next spring, or whenever it was, the eggs would hatch and the beetles would come up.  Then the Egyptians imagined that the beetle hadn’t died at all, or if it had that it also had the power of restoring itself to life, possessed immortality.  So they thought it must be a god and began to worship it,” and he would pause and survey me with those amazing eyes, bright as glass beads, to see if I were properly impressed.

“You don’t say!”

“Sure.  That’s where the worship came from,” and then he might go on and add a bit about monkey-worship, the Zoroastrians and the Parsees, the sacred bull of Egypt, its sex power as a reason for its religious elevation, and of sex worship in general; the fantastic orgies at Sidon and Tyre, where enormous images of the male and female sex organs were carried aloft before the multitude.

Being totally ignorant of these matters at the time, not a rumor of them having reached me as yet in my meagre reading, I knew that it must be so.  It fired me with a keen desire to read—­not the old orthodox emasculated histories of the schools but those other books and pamphlets to which I fancied he must have access.  Eagerly I inquired of him where, how.  He told me that in some cases they were outlawed, banned or not translated wholly or fully, owing to the puritanism and religiosity of the day, but he gave me titles and authors to whom I might have access, and the address of an old book-dealer or two who could get them for me.

In addition he was interested in ethnology and geology, as well as astronomy (the outstanding phases at least), and many, many phases of applied art:  pottery, rugs, pictures, engraving, wood-carving, jewel-cutting and designing, and I know not what else, yet there was always room even in his most serious studies for humor of the bizarre and eccentric type, amounting to all but an obsession.  He wanted to laugh, and he found occasion for doing so under the most serious, or at least semi-serious, circumstances.  Thus I recall that one of the butts of his extreme humor was this same Dick, whom he studied with the greatest care for points worthy his humorous appreciation.  Dick, in addition to his genuinely lively mental interests, was a most romantic person on one side, a most puling and complaining soul on the other.  As a newspaper artist I believe he was only a fairly respectable craftsman, if so much, whereas Peter was much better, although he deferred to Dick in the most persuasive manner and seemed to believe at times, though I knew he did not, that Dick represented all there was to know in matters artistic.