It was a spring evening and he and I had gone for a walk in Jackson Park. We went on a street-car and when we were alighting the car started suddenly and my awkward friend was thrown to the ground and rolled over and over in the dusty street. The motorman, the conductor and several of the men passengers alighted and gathered about. No, he was not hurt and would not give his name and address to the anxious conductor. “I’m not hurt. I’m not going to sue the company. Damn it, man, I defy you to make me give my name and address if I do not care to do so.” He assumed a look of outraged dignity. “Just suppose now that I happen to be some great man, traveling about the country—in foreign parts, incognito, as it were. Let us suppose I am a great prince or a dignitary of some sort. Look how big I am.” He pointed to his huge round paunch. “If I told who I was cheers might break forth. I do not care for that. With me, you see, it is different than with yourselves. I have had too much of that sort of thing already. I’m sick of it. If it happens that, in the process of my study of the customs of your charming country, I chose to fall off a street-car that is my own affair. I did not fall on anyone.” We walked away leaving the conductor, the motorman and passengers somewhat mystified. “Ah, he’s a nut,” I heard one of the passengers say to another. As for the fall, it had shaken something out of my friend. When later we were seated on a bench in the park one of the fragments, the little illuminating bits of his personal history, that sometimes came from him and that were his chief charm for me, seemed to have been shaken loose and fell from him as a ripe apple falls from a tree in a wind. He began talking, a little hesitatingly, as though feeling his way in the darkness along the hallway of a strange house at night. It had happened I had never seen him with a woman and he seldom spoke of women, except with a witty and half scornful gesture, but now he began speaking of an experience with a woman. The tale concerned an adventure of his young manhood and occurred after his mother had died and after his father married again, in fact after he had left home, not to return. The enmity, that seemed always to have existed between himself and his father became while he continued living at home, more and more pronounced, but on the part of the son, my friend, it was never expressed in words and his dislike of his father took the form of contempt that he had made so bad a second marriage. The new woman in the house seemed such a poor stick. The house was always dirty and the children, some other man’s children, were always about under foot. When the two men who had been working in the fields came into the house to eat, the food was badly cooked.