magnificent vitality he drew from everyone their best. In his company
clever people waxed intellectual giants, while the dull sat amazed at
their own originality. Conversing with him, Podsnap might have been
piquant, Dogberry incisive. But better than all else, I found it
listening to his own talk. Of what he spoke I could tell you no more
than could the children of Hamelin have told the tune the Pied Piper
played. I only know that at the tangled music of his strong voice the
walls of the mean room faded away, and that beyond I saw a brave,
laughing world that called to me; a world full of joyous fight, where
some won and some lost. But that mattered not a jot, because whatever
else came of it there was a right royal game for all; a world where
merry gentlemen feared neither life nor death, and Fate was but the
Master of the Revels.

Such was my first introduction to Dr. Washburn, or to give him the
name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter,
Dr. Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the
whole man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites,
and then he was more brute than man--brutish in his instincts, in his
appetites, brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep
blue eyes would grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have
thought him an angel in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as
to suggest the possibility of his wings being folded away underneath.
Often have I tried to make up my mind whether it has been better for
me or worse that I ever came to know him; but as easy would it be for
the tree to say whether the rushing winds and the wild rains have
shaped it or mis-shaped.

Susan's place remained vacant for some time. My mother would explain
to the few friends who occasionally came from afar to see us, that her