The factory in Cortlandt Street was in many respects a college in which Jim was the chaplain; and it had a professor who should be mentioned here. It also had a dormitory; several of the young fellows employed in the factory lived on the top floor of the building. I was one of them, and I did not change my quarters when I was advanced to the position of assistant to the shipping clerk. Two great attractions kept me there. One was that the other fellows were out every evening visiting theatres and music-halls, so that I had the whole loft, and, in fact, the whole factory all to myself and to a chum of mine, who was much older than I in years but not in his position in the factory. His name was Bilharz, and he was the second attraction. He was the opposite to Jim and to every human being I had ever met. He knew nothing of nor did he care for the concrete or practical things of life, but always lived in dreams about things which happened centuries ago. He knew Latin and Greek and all kinds of literatures, but never made any attempts to make any use of his knowledge. Factory work of the humblest kind was good enough for him, and I believed that he would have been satisfied to work for his board only, if pay had been refused him. He informed me once by an accidental slip of the tongue that he had studied theology at the University of Freiburg, in southern Germany, and would have become a priest if an unfortunate love-affair had not put an end to his ecclesiastical aspirations. He had no other aims when he came to America, he said, than to work for a modest living and to lead a life of profound obscurity, until the Lord called him away from this valley of tears, as he expressed it. He used a German expression and called the earth a “Thraenenthal.” Although a German he spoke English well, being a finished scholar and having lived in America for a number of years, and having a memory for sound which impressed me as most remarkable. He sang like a nightingale, but only on evenings when we were all alone. Ecclesiastical music was his favorite, and during many an evening the strains of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” “Ave Maria,” and “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” rang forth from the spacious lofts of the New England Cracker Factory and lost themselves in the silence of night among the deserted buildings of Cortlandt Street, which were alive in daytime only. I never tired listening to his recitations of Latin and Greek poetry, although I did not understand it, and of selected passages from Shakespeare and Goethe, which I did understand. He loved the art of articulate speech and of melody, and he thought of things only that happened three thousand years ago when Homer sang and the Olympian gods guided the destinies of men, but he cared for nothing else. The steam-engine and every other kind of mechanism were to him a deadly prose which, in his opinion, Satan had invented for the purpose of leading astray the spirit of man. “They are the weapons by which