ow-ceiled room to
which he led me "for fun," the absolutely black or brown girls with
their white teeth and shiny eyes, the unexplainable, unintelligible love
of rhythm and the dance displayed, the beating of a drum, the sinuous,
winding motions of the body, I am grateful to him. He released my mind,
broadened my view, lengthened my perspective. For as I sat with him,
watching him beat his drum or play his flute, noted the gayety, his love
of color and effect, and feeling myself _low_, a criminal, disgraced,
the while I was staring with all my sight and enjoying it intensely, I
realized that I was dealing with a man who was "bigger" than I was in
many respects, saner, really more wholesome. I was a moral coward, and
he was not losing his life and desires through fear--which the majority
of us do. He was strong, vital, unafraid, and he made me so.

But, lest I seem to make him low or impossible to those who
instinctively cannot accept life beyond the range of their own little
routine world, let me hasten to his other aspects. He was not low but
simple, brilliant and varied in his tastes. America and its point of
view, religious and otherwise, was simply amusing to him, not to be
taken seriously. He loved to contemplate man at his mysteries, rituals,
secret schools. He loved better yet ancient history, medieval inanities
and atrocities--a most singular, curious and wonderful mind. Already at
this age he knew many historians and scientists (their work), a most
astonishing and illuminating list to me--Maspero, Froude, Huxley,
Darwin, Wallace, Rawlinson, Froissart, Hallam, Taine, Avebury! The list
of painters, sculptors and architects with whose work he was familiar
and books about whom or illustrated by whom he knew, is too long to be
given here. His chief interest, in so far as I could make out, in these
opening days, was Egyptology and the study of things natural and
primeval--all the wonders of a natural, groping, savage world.

"Dreiser," he exclaimed once with gusto, his bright beady eyes gleaming
with an immense human warmth, "you haven't the slightest idea of the
fascination of some of the old beliefs. Do you know the significance of
a scarab in Egyptian religious worship, for instance?"

"A scarab? What's a scarab? I never heard of one," I answered.

"A beetle, of course. An Egyptian beetle. You know what a beetle is,
don't you? Well, those things burrowed in the earth, the mud of the
Nile, at a certain period of