And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer, teacher and father to me. He was never my friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned. I detested his ideas, his philosophy and many of his actions, and this detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting ahead of my story. Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding, size, edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical application. (I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with terms like “paley-bendy” or, “fusils conjoined in fess, gules” and “sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition, indeed any erudition, contemptuously. When I asked why he had bothered to pick it up, his retort was, “Why have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?”) As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely with setting up a neat page; he sometimes spent hours laying out some trivia, which could have interested only its author, until he struck a proof which satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry, essays, manifestoes, composing directly from the font, running off a single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and immediately destroyed before pieing the type. I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day; Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning before it was time to open he sent me across town on the horse-cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of beef—twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed by the butcher in thin strips. After I had been with him long enough to tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase the heart; it is the vital food.” While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday’s bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent of either cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it over the gas flame of a light standard until it was sooted and toasted rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper.