CHAPTER XXIX
Worthy of more detailed description, however, is the figure of an old, old man I met about this time, a dignified, venerable and mysterious being, man of the world, lawyer, musician, scholar, poet, but above all, exile. Incidentally, he was madman too. What unkindly tricks fate had played with his fine brain, I never learned with accuracy. It was but the ruin of a great mind I knew. Pain and suffering of no unusual order, as I soon discovered, had, at any rate, left his heart as wise and sweet and gentle as any I have ever known. His voice, his eyes, his smile, his very gestures, even, had in them all the misery and all the goodness of the world. Our chance meeting deepened into a friendship, the intimacy of which between Padre and Figlio—names he himself assigned respectively—yet never permitted a full account of his own mysterious past. The little I gathered of his personal history before he died some dozen years later in England, came to me from patchwork sources, but none of it from his own lips. What term the alienists might use to describe the mental disorder of Alfred H. Louis I do not know.
The first time I saw him he cut a sorry figure; an old fellow in far worse plight and even worse down at heel than I was myself. It was in an olive-oil warehouse, at No. 1, Water Street, on the river front. McKay, the owner, whom I had met through some newspaper story or other, had converted me to the wisdom of an occasional glass of olive oil. It was healthful and delicious, but to me its chief value was as food. On this day of broiling heat I had wandered in for a glass of oil, and, while waiting a moment for the owner to appear, I noticed an old tramp seated on a packing-case, gazing at me in penetrating fashion. He was a Jew, he was very small, his feet were
