and held it a moment tightly, then presently got up, put on his old hat again, with the remark that it was time for bed, and followed me slowly to a Broadway cable car. His small, frail figure seemed to have dwindled to a child's shadow as he moved beside me; he had a way of hunching his thin shoulders that still further dwarfed his height; I felt myself a giant physically, but in my mind his stature reached the stars. We exchanged addresses. He lived in 8th Street, a miserable attic, I learned later, though I never actually entered it. Of his mental disorder no inkling had then reached me. I watched him melt into the shadows of the side street with the feeling that I watched some legendary figure, some ancient prophet, some mysterious priest. He smiled at me; there was love and blessing in the brilliant eyes. Then he was gone.... For me, at this time, to meet and talk with such a man held something of the fabulous. He had set fire to a hundred new thoughts and left them flaming in me.
It was in this way began a friendship that has always seemed to me marvellous, and that lasted till his death in England some fifteen years later. Sweet, patient, resigned and lovable to the end, he died incurably insane, the charity in him never tainted, the tenderness unstained, the passionate love of his kind, of beauty, of all that is lovely and of good report, unspoilt. The grimmest pain had not soured the natural sweetness in him, his gentle spirit knew no bitterness, his megalomania, complicated, I believe, with other varieties of disorder, was harmless and inoffensive. As Padre he still lives in my memory; as The Old Man of Visions ("The Listener"), he still haunts my imagination. "You have taken my name away," he chided me with a smile, when I published this picture of him. "I am now uncertain who I am. That is well. I am Anybody I choose to be. I will be Everybody." He had rooms in Great Russell Street at the time. Though baptised by Charles Kingsley into the English Church, he later became a Roman Catholic, but, when the end came, he reverted to the blood and faith born in him. He
was buried, by his own wish, in a Hebrew cemetery. The
