* * * * *

All work was suspended the day of Jack’s funeral.

Spalton eloquently read the curious, crude composition of his disciple ... which had fine flashes, as of lightning in a dark sky, here and there, in it.

Then Spalton began adding words of his own, in praise of the deceased—­

“You all know this dear comrade of ours,” he began, “this dear friend whose really fine soul, while in the body—­went under the appellation of Gabby Jack—­”

Here Spalton broke down.  He unashamedly dropped into the chair behind the reading-desk and wept aloud.  He could say no more....

* * * * *

In The Dawn for the ensuing month he put a wonderful and beautiful tribute to his disciple ... who had thoroughly loved, and believed in him.

* * * * *

On a cold day of blowing snow, “Pete” came tramping in to town ... his high boots laced to the knees, a heavy alpaca coat about him ... he had come all the way from Philadelphia on foot, to add his portrait to our gallery of eccentrics ... but he was not so unusual after all ... there was too much of the hungry hardness of youth in him, the cocksureness of conceit which he considered genius.

Immediately he put Spalton to question ... and everything and everybody to question....

He irritated Spalton most by attacking doctors ... (though Spalton himself did so in his magazine) ...  Spalton’s father was an old family practitioner....

But the Master’s revenge came.

“Pete” fell sick.  Spalton sent for his father to doctor him.  And made the old man use a strong horse-medicine on him ... which he himself brought up from the stables....

“The boy is such an ass ...”  Spalton told me laughingly, “that it’s a veterinarian he needs, not a doctor.”

* * * * *

There was Speedwell, the young naturalist ... a queer, stooping, gentle, shy thing, who talked almost as an idiot would talk till he got on his favourite topic of bird and beast and flower.  In personal appearance he was a sort of Emerson gone to weed ... he walked about with a quick, perky, deprecative step....

“—­queer fish,” John remarked of him, “but, Razorre, you ought to come on him in the woods ... there he is a different person ... he sits under a tree till he seems to become part of the vegetation, the landscape ... when I had him out to camp with me last summer he would go off alone and stay away till we thought he had got lost, or had walked into a pond, in his simpleness, and drowned....”

We followed him, and watched him....

There he sat ... in his brown corduroys ... his lock of hair over his eyes ... that simple, sweet, idiotic expression, like sick sunshine, on his mouth....

And after a while the birds came down to him ... pecked all around him ... and a squirrel climbed up on his shoulder ... he seemed to have an attraction for the wild things ... it wasn’t as if they just accepted him as a part of the surroundings ... the man sat there like a stump till we grew tired watching, and returned to camp....