Thinking over my distinguished relations, I found none fit to black the boots of that kindly waiter in Krisch’s cheap eating-house, Otto, the Black Forest German, who trusted us for food and often forwent his trumpery tip with a cheery smile. And there were many others, whose memory remains bright and wonderful from those dismal New York years.... A volume of “Distinguished People I have Met,” for instance, would include the Italian bootblack at the corner of 4th Avenue and 20th Street, who had the sun in his face, in his bright black eyes and brown skin, and who trusted me sometimes for a month, although five cents meant as much to him as it did to me. The bigwigs I interviewed for newspapers are forgotten, but the faces of Otto and the Italian shine in memory still. I even remember the sentence the latter taught me. It invariably formed our daily greeting: _E molto tempo che siete stato amalato?_ Often since have I spouted it in Italy, as bewildered by the voluble replies I could not understand, as the peasants were by my familiar enquiry after their health. Mrs. Bernstein, I think, would be entitled to a place, and Grant, who pawned his overcoat to buy me food, most certainly to full mention. CHAPTER XXIX Worthy of more detailed description, however, is the figure of an old, old man I met about this time, a dignified, venerable and mysterious being, man of the world, lawyer, musician, scholar, poet, but above all, exile. Incidentally, he was madman too. What unkindly tricks fate had played with his fine brain, I never learned with accuracy. It was but the ruin of a great mind I knew. Pain and suffering of no unusual order, as I soon discovered, had, at any rate, left his heart as wise and sweet and gentle as any I have ever known. His voice, his eyes, his smile, his very gestures, even, had in them all the misery and all the goodness of the world. Our chance meeting deepened into a friendship, the intimacy of which between Padre and Figlio--names he himself assigned respectively--yet never permitted a full account of his own mysterious past. The little I gathered of his personal history before he died some dozen years later in England, came to me from patchwork sources, but none of it from his own lips. What term the alienists might use to describe the mental disorder of Alfred H. Louis I do not know.