was a greater book than the Bible ... and more
miraculous ... "one man, Mohammed, who left a work of greater beauty
than the combined efforts of the several hundred who gave us that
hodge-podge, the Bible."

* * * * *

Pfeiler had been left a fortune by his father, a wealthy German merchant
... so, like Sir Richard Burton, he had made off to the Near East ...
where he had lived among the Turks for ten years ... till, what with his
buying rare manuscripts and Oriental and Turkish art, he had suddenly
run upon the rocks of bankruptcy ... and had returned from the Levantine
a ruined, helpless scholar, who had never been taught to be anything
else but a man of culture and leisure....

By steerage he made his way to America ... to Chicago ... all his works
of art, his priceless manuscripts sold ... the money gone like water
through the assiduities of false friends and sycophants....

On the bum in Chicago ... a hotel clerk, discharged as incompetent--he
had forgotten to insist that a man and woman register always as man and
wife ... "because it was such hypocrisy" ... finally a dishwasher, who
lived in a hall bed-room ... no friends because of his abstractedness,
his immersion in oriental scholarship ... his only place of refuge, his
dwelling place, when not washing dishes for a mere existence, the Public
Library....

"Old Pfeiler" drank coffee by the quart, as drunkards drink whiskey. He
had a nervous affliction which caused him to shake his head continually,
as if in impatience ... or as a dog shakes his head to dislodge
something that has crept into his ear....

He was as timid as a girl....

The common dormitory was no place for him ... I am sorry to confess
that, for a while, I helped to make his life miserable for him ... each
night the beak-nosed pugilist-lad and I raised a merry roughhouse in the
place.... Pfeiler was our chief butt. We put things in his bed ... threw
objects about so they would wake him up. One night I found him crying
silently ... but somehow not ignobly ... this made me shift about in my
actions toward him, and see how miserable my conduct had been....

So the next time "Beak-horn," as I called my plug-ugly friend, started
to tease the old man, I asked him to stop ... that we had tormented
Pfeiler long enough. "Beak-horn" replied with a surprised, savage stare
... and the next moment he was on me, half in jest, half in earnest. I
boxed with him as hard and s