For several seasons he came every morning to North Beach to take sea-baths.  Sometimes he rode his well-known white horse, but oftener he walked.  He bathed in the open sea, making, as one expressed it, twenty-five tents out of the Pacific Ocean, by avoiding the bathhouse.  Was this the charm that drew him forth so early?  It not seldom chanced that we walked downtown together.  At times he was quite communicative, speaking of himself in a way that was peculiar.  It seems he had thoughts of marrying before his episode with the widow.

“Do you think a young girl of twenty could love an old man like me?” he asked me one day, as we were walking along the street.

I looked at his huge and ungainly bulk, and into his animal face, and made no direct answer.  Love!  Six millions of dollars is a great sum.  Money may buy youth and beauty, but love does not come at its call.  God’s highest gifts are free; only the second-rate things can be bought with money.  Did this sordid old man yearn for pure human love amid his millions?  Did such a dream cast a momentary glamour over a life spent in raking among the muck-heaps?  If so, it passed away, for he never married.

He understood his own case.  He knew in what estimation he was held by the public, and did not conceal his scorn for its opinion.

“My love of money is a disease.  My saving and hoarding as I do is irrational, and I know it.  It pains me to pay five cents for a streetcar ride, or a quarter of a dollar for a dinner.  My pleasure in accumulating property is morbid, but I have felt it from the time I was a foot peddler in Charlotte, Campbell, and Pittsylvania counties, in Virginia, until now.  It is a sort of insanity, and it is incurable; but it is about as good a form of madness as any, and all the world is mad in some, fashion.”

This was the substance of what he said of himself when in one of his moods of free speech, and it gave me a new idea of human nature—­a man whose keen and penetrating brain could subject his own consciousness to a cool and correct analysis, seeing clearly the folly which he could not resist.  The autobiography of such a man might furnish a curious psychological study, and explain the formation and development in society of those moral monsters called misers.  Nowhere in literature has such a character been fully portrayed, though Shakespeare and George Eliot have given vivid touches of some of its features.

He always retained a kind feeling for the South, over whose hills he had borne his peddler’s pack when a youth.  After the war, two young ex-Confederate soldiers came to San Francisco to seek their fortunes.  A small room adjoining my office was vacant, and the brothers requested me to secure it for them as cheap as possible.  I applied to Reese, telling him who the young men were, and describing their broken and impecunious condition.

“Tell them to take the room free of rent—­but it ought to bring five dollars a month.”