rible fetiches of the
Africans, the tricks and speculations of the priests of Greek and Roman
temples, finally telling me the story of the ambitious eel-seller who
anchored the dead horse in the stream in order to have plenty of eels
every morning for market. I revolted. I declared he was sickening.

"My boy," he assured me, "you are too thin-skinned. You can't take life
that way. It's all good to me, whatever happens. We're here. We're not
running it. Why be afraid to look at it? The chemistry of a man's body
isn't any worse than the chemistry of anything else, and we're eating
the dead things we've killed all the time. A little more or a little
less in any direction--what difference?"

Apropos of this same a little later--to shock me, of course, as he well
knew he could--he assured me that in eating a dish of chop suey in a
Chinese restaurant, a very low one, he had found and eaten a part of the
little finger of a child, and that "it was very good--very good,
indeed."

"Dog!" I protested. "Swine! Thou ghoula!" but he merely chuckled
heartily and stuck to his tale!

But if I paint this side of him it is to round out his wonderful, to me
almost incredible, figure. Insisting on such things, he was still and
always warm and human, sympathetic, diplomatic and cautious, according
to his company, so that he was really acceptable anywhere. Peter would
never shock those who did not want to be shocked. A minute or two or
five after such a discourse as the above he might be describing some
marvelously beautiful process of pollination among the flowers, the
history of some medieval trade guild or gazing at a beautiful scene and
conveying to one by his very attitude his unspoken emotion.

After spending about two or three years in Philadelphia--which city
came to reflect for me the color of Peter's interests and mood--he
suddenly removed to Newark, having been nursing an arrangement with its
principal paper for some time. Some quarrel or dissatisfaction with the
director of his department caused him, without other notice, to paste
some crisp quotation from one of the poets on his desk and depart! In
Newark, a city to which before this I had paid not the slightest
attention, he found himself most happy; and I, living in New York close
at hand, felt that I possessed in it and him an earthly paradise.
Although it contained no more than 300,000 people and seemed, or had, a
drear factory realm only, he soon revealed it to me in qu