Hunger was agony to him, but, oddly enough, he never grew less rotund. He particularly enjoyed singing what he called _la messe noire_ with astonishing variations in his high falsetto. This “mass” was performed by all three of us to a plaster-cast faun an artist had given me in Toronto. It had come in the packing-case with our other things, this Donatello, and we set it on the mantelpiece, filled a saucer with melted candle stolen from a boarder’s room, lit the piece of string which served for wick, and turned the gas out. In the darkened room the faunish face leered and moved, as the flickering light from below set the shadows shifting about its features; the fiddle, Louis’s thin falsetto, Kay’s bass, badly out of tune, and my own voice thrown in as well, produced a volume of sound the other boarders strongly objected to--at one o’clock in the morning. Yet the only time Mrs. Bernstein came to complain, she got no farther than the door: Louis had a blanket over his head and shoulders, Kay was in his night-shirt, which was a day-shirt really, the old Irving wig lying crooked on his head, and I was but half dressed, fiddling for all I was worth. The darkened room, the three figures passing to and fro and chanting, the strange weird face of the faun, it by the flickering flame from below, startled her so that she stood stock-still on the threshold without a word. The next second she was gone.... What eventually happened to Louis I never knew. Months later he moved to a room up-town. We lost track of one another, and I have no idea how fate behaved to him in after-life. He was thirty-five when he sang the _messe noire_, hunted snipe, and gave occasional lessons in French and Spanish.