people like you are keeping in slavery people like me,” he said once, jokingly, referring to my interest in the boiler-room operations and to my admiration of the great captains of industry whose lives I studied and whose work I had seen and admired at the Philadelphia exposition. I sometimes suspected that he felt alarmed by what he considered my worship of false gods, and that this impelled him to do everything he could for my redemption from heathenism. My admiration for his learning was great, but my sympathy for his misfortunes was even greater. His hands were once caught in a machine and most of his fingers had become stiff and crooked so that they looked like the talons of a falcon. His sharp features, a crooked nose and protruding eyes, supported this suggestion of a falcon, but his awkward, flat-footed walk suggested a falcon with broken wings; to say nothing of his other misfortunes which made him in spirit also a falcon with broken wings. I felt that he knew a great deal more about the Jane incident than he cared to disclose to me. One day I referred to her as the Minnehaha of Cortlandt Street. “Minnehaha, laughing water,” exclaimed Bilharz: “where did you ever get that, you boiler-room bug?” and he laughed as if he had never heard a funnier thing in his life. “From Jim, the boiler-room hermit, to Longfellow, one of the greatest of American poets, is a tremendous jump, a _salto mortale_, as they call it in a circus,” said Bilharz; and then, growing more serious and thoughtful, he added something like this: “It is really wonderful what the eyes of a woman can do! They are just like the stars in the heavens, encouraging us poor mortals to aim at celestial heights. But many a sky-rocket seemed to be sailing for the stars and suddenly it found itself buried in mud. I am one of these sky-rockets,” said Bilharz; “you are not, thanks to the timely intervention of a kindly divinity.” He meant Jim. Then, continuing in his usual dramatic manner, he recited in Latin an ode of Horace, in which the poet speaks of a youth trusting to the beaming countenance of his lady-love as a mariner trusting to the sunlit ripples of a calm sea who is suddenly upset by a treacherous squall and, being rescued, gratefully offers his wet garments in sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea. After translating the ode and explaining its meaning to me he urged me to hang my best clothes in the boiler-room as a sacrifice to Jim, the divinity which had rescued me from the treacherous waves of “Minnehaha, laughing water.” “You are the luckiest of mortals, my boy,” said Bilharz to me; “some day you will provoke the envy of the gods and then look out for stern Nemesis!” I did not understand the full meaning of these classical allusions, but he assured me that some day I should. I told Bilharz that my luck, of which he spoke so often, was mostly due to my being so near to a man of his learning, and that I thought he ought to be a professor in Nassau Hall at Princeton.