Each day he spent most of the day, immobile, like that....

“Say Razorre,” the Master continued, after a thoughtful pause, “you know you nuts are teaching me a lot of things....

“The trouble with the educated, regular folks is that they lose so much by drawing the line ... often everything that is spontaneous and fine....  This thing called God, you know, draws the line nowhere....

“If ‘Crazy’ Speedwell fell heir to a large sum of money, his relatives could find a commission of physicians anywhere, who would honestly have him into custody for lunacy ... yet, in some respects, he is the wisest and kindest man I have ever known ... though, in others, he is often such a fool as to try my patience very hard, at times.”

* * * * *

Most of us who had arrived at “The Studios” from “foreign” parts, slept in the common dormitory.

We held frequent “roughhouses” there, the younger of us ... to the annoyance of Speedwell.  Spalton finally gave him permission to sleep and live, alone, in the shed where the fire-truck and hose was stored....

One night, for malicious fun, a beak-nosed young prize-fighter, and several others (including myself) sneaked into his abode while he slept ... thoughtlessly we turned the gas on and tiptoed out again....

Not long after he came staggering forth, half-suffocated....

Everybody laughed at the tale of this ... at first Spalton himself laughed, our American spirit of rough joking and horse-play gaining the uppermost in him ... but then he recalled to mind the seriousness of our practical joke, and burned with anger at us over what we had done.  And he threatened to “fire” on the spot anyone who ever again molested “Crazy” Speedwell....

* * * * *

“Old Pfeiler” we called him....

Pfeiler had attended one of Spalton’s lectures at Chicago.

Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth and travel....

He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton’s lecture.  Spalton brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios.

There he found that the queer, gentle, old man was as helpless as a child ... all he could be trusted to do was to write addresses on letters ... which he was set at, not too exactingly....

I never saw so happy a man as Pfeiler was that winter.

He was a Buddhist, not by pose, but by sincere conviction.  He thought, also, that the Koran was a greater book than the Bible ... and more miraculous ... “one man, Mohammed, who left a work of greater beauty than the combined efforts of the several hundred who gave us that hodge-podge, the Bible.”

* * * * *

Pfeiler had been left a fortune by his father, a wealthy German merchant ... so, like Sir Richard Burton, he had made off to the Near East ... where he had lived among the Turks for ten years ... till, what with his buying rare manuscripts and Oriental and Turkish art, he had suddenly run upon the rocks of bankruptcy ... and had returned from the Levantine a ruined, helpless scholar, who had never been taught to be anything else but a man of culture and leisure....