ne their best. In his company
clever people waxed intellectual giants, while the dull sat amazed at
their own originality. Conversing with him, Podsnap might have been
piquant, Dogberry incisive. But better than all else, I found it
listening to his own talk. Of what he spoke I could tell you no more
than could the children of Hamelin have told the tune the Pied Piper
played. I only know that at the tangled music of his strong voice
the walls of the mean room faded away, and that beyond I saw a brave,
laughing world that called to me; a world full of joyous fight, where
some won and some lost. But that mattered not a jot, because whatever
else came of it there was a right royal game for all; a world where
merry gentlemen feared neither life nor death, and Fate was but the
Master of the Revels.

Such was my first introduction to Dr. Washburn, or to give him the
name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter, Dr.
Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the whole
man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites, and then
he was more brute than man--brutish in his instincts, in his appetites,
brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep blue eyes would
grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have thought him an angel
in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as to suggest the
possibility of his wings being folded away underneath. Often have I
tried to make up my mind whether it has been better for me or worse that
I ever came to know him; but as easy would it be for the tree to
say whether the rushing winds and the wild rains have shaped it or
mis-shaped.

Susan's place remained vacant for some time. My mother would explain
to the few friends who occasionally came from afar to see us, that her
"housemaid" she had been compelled to suddenly discharge, and that
we were waiting for the arrival of a new and better specimen. But the
months passed and we still waited, and my father on the rare days when
a client would ring the office bell, would, after pausing a decent
interval, open the front door himself, and then call downstairs
indignantly and loudly, to know why "Jane" or "Mary" could not attend to
their work. And my mother, that the bread-boy or the milkman might not
put it about the neighbourhood that the Kelvers in the big corner house
kept no servant, would hide herself behind a thick veil and fetch all
things herself from streets a long way of