call at Digwell's, whose
undertaker's shop was across the way and whose door was always open, the
gas burning as befitted one liable to be called upon at any hour of the
day or night; or perhaps he would pass the time of day with Pestler,
the druggist; or give ten minutes to Porterfield, listening to his talk
about the growing prices of meat.

Had you asked his former associates why a man of O'Day's intelligence
should have cultivated the acquaintance of an undertaker like Digwell,
for instance, whose face was a tombstone, his movements when on duty
those of a crow stepping across wet places in a cornfield, they would
have shaken their heads in disparaging wonder. Had you asked Felix he
would have answered with a smile: "Why to hear Digwell laugh!" And then,
warming to his subject, he would have told you what a very jolly person
Digwell really was, if you were fortunate enough to find him unoccupied
in his private den, way back in the rear of his shop. How he had
entertained him by the hour with anecdotes of his early life when he was
captain of a baseball team, and what fun he had gotten out of it, and
did still, when he could sneak away to help pack the benches.

Had you inquired about Pestler, the druggist, there would have followed
some such reply as: "Pestler? Did you say? Because Pestler is one of the
most surprising men I know. He has kept that same shop, he tells me,
for twenty-two years. Of course, he knows only a very little about
drugs--just enough to keep him out of the hands of the police--but then
none of you are aware, perhaps, that Pestler is also a student? You
might think, when you saw only the top of his fuzzy, half-bald head
sticking up above the wooden partition, that he was putting up a
prescription, but you would be wrong. What he is really doing, with the
aid of his microscope, is dissecting bugs, and pasting them on glass
slides for use in the public schools. And he plays the violin--and very
well, too! He often entertains me with his music."

Sanderson, the florist, was another denizen who interested him. To look
at Sanderson tying ribbons on funeral wreaths, no one would ever have
supposed that there was rarely a first night at the opera at which
he was not present, paying for his ticket, too, and rather despising
Pestler, who got his theatre tickets free because he allowed the
managers the use of his windows for advertisements. Felix forgave even
his frozen roses whenever the Scotchman, ha