manner has this axiom been brought
home to me within the last fortnight.

It was just two o'clock in the morning when I was aroused from a restful
sleep by the vigorous ringing of my door-bell. The untimely disturber
proved to be a messenger bearing a note, scrawled almost to the point
of illegibility, from an old Norseman by the name of Olaf Jansen. After
much deciphering, I made out the writing, which simply said: "Am ill
unto death. Come." The call was imperative, and I lost no time in making
ready to comply.

Perhaps I may as well explain here that Olaf Jansen, a man who quite
recently celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday, has for the last
half-dozen years been living alone in an unpretentious bungalow out
Glendale way, a short distance from the business district of Los
Angeles, California.

It was less than two years ago, while out walking one afternoon that
I was attracted by Olaf Jansen's house and its homelike surroundings,
toward its owner and occupant, whom I afterward came to know as a
believer in the ancient worship of Odin and Thor.

There was a gentleness in his face, and a kindly expression in the
keenly alert gray eyes of this man who had lived more than four-score
years and ten; and, withal, a sense of loneliness that appealed to my
sympathy. Slightly stooped, and with his hands clasped behind him, he
walked back and forth with slow and measured tread, that day when first
we met. I can hardly say what particular motive impelled me to pause
in my walk and engage him in conversation. He seemed pleased when I
complimented him on the attractiveness of his bungalow, and on the
well-tended vines and flowers clustering in profusion over its windows,
roof and wide piazza.

I soon discovered that my new acquaintance was no ordinary person, but
one profound and learned to a remarkable degree; a man who, in the later
years of his long life, had dug deeply into books and become strong in
the power of meditative silence.

I encouraged him to talk, and soon gathered that he had resided only six
or seven years in Southern California, but had passed the dozen years
prior in one of the middle Eastern states. Before that he had been a
fisherman off the coast of Norway, in the region of the Lofoden Islands,
from whence he had made trips still farther north to Spitzbergen and
even to Franz Josef Land.

When I started to take my leave, he seemed reluctant to have me go, and
asked me to come again. Although at the