his disciple ... who had thoroughly loved, and believed in
him.

* * * * *

On a cold day of blowing snow, "Pete" came tramping in to town ... his
high boots laced to the knees, a heavy alpaca coat about him ... he had
come all the way from Philadelphia on foot, to add his portrait to our
gallery of eccentrics ... but he was not so unusual after all ... there
was too much of the hungry hardness of youth in him, the cocksureness of
conceit which he considered genius.

Immediately he put Spalton to question ... and everything and everybody
to question....

He irritated Spalton most by attacking doctors ... (though Spalton
himself did so in his magazine) ... Spalton's father was an old family
practitioner....

But the Master's revenge came.

"Pete" fell sick. Spalton sent for his father to doctor him. And made
the old man use a strong horse-medicine on him ... which he himself
brought up from the stables....

"The boy is such an ass ..." Spalton told me laughingly, "that it's a
veterinarian he needs, not a doctor."

* * * * *

There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle,
shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his
favourite topic of bird and beast and flower. In personal appearance he
was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick,
perky, deprecative step....

"--queer fish," John remarked of him, "but, Razorre, you ought to come
on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under
a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ...
when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and
stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in
his simpleness, and drowned...."

We followed him, and watched him....

There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his
eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick sunshine, on
his mouth....

And after a while the birds came down to him ... pecked all around him
... and a squirrel climbed up on his shoulder ... he seemed to have an
attraction for the wild things ... it wasn't as if they just accepted
him as a part of the surroundings ... the man sat there like a stump
till we grew tired watching, and returned to camp....

Each day he spent most of the day, immobile, like that....

"Say Razorre," the Master continued, a