Big Mitch never bore me the slightest ill-will for the report I had made to his father. He was too indurated an Ishmael for that. He knew everybody disliked him, but he did not care a cent for that. When he wanted other people’s company, he _took_ it. The question of their enjoyment was one that never entered his mind. It was in pure delight in seeing me that he grabbed my knee, pinched my knee-cap until it sent a qualm to my stomach, and told me that he had ordered my driver to go home, and that I had got to stay and see the country. Things came pretty near to a lively squall when I got the impudence of this through my head; but when Billings joined his frightened, anxious pleadings to the youth’s brutalities, and I saw his humbled, troubled, mortified face, I yielded. We were free from Mitch after luncheon, and poor Billings began to make a pitiful little apology; but I stopped him. “I don’t mind,” I said; “I was only thinking of _you_.” “Oh, I’ve got accustomed to it,” he said, trying to smile; “and it’s really more tolerable than you would think, when you get to know him. And when he is too--too trying--why, there is one place that he understands he must respect. Come to my library. You are the first person who has ever entered it except myself.” He led me to the door of a room at the end of a dark passage-way. As he put the key in the lock I noticed a curious smell. “I want you to see,” said he, “the sort of thing I’m interested in.” I had not been five seconds in the room before I knew what it was--the sort of thing he was interested in. Loneliness breeds strange maggots in the brain of a New Yorker temporarily engaged in the mud-mining business. My old friend Billings was now a full-blown Theosophist, and he had that little room stuffed full of more Mahatma-literature and faquir trumpery than you could shake a stick at. There were skulls and fans and grass-cloth things and heathen gods till--literally--your eyes couldn’t rest. There were four-legged gods and eight-legged gods, and gods with their legs where their arms ought to be, and gods who were of the gentleman-god and lady-god sex at one and the same time, and gods with horns and miscellaneous gods, and a few other gods. In odd places here and there, where he had not had time to arrange them properly, there were a few more gods. [Illustration] And then my poor old friend sat down and tried to put me through the whole business, and tell me what a great and mysterious thing it was, and what a splendid scheme it would be to get into the two-hundred and ninety-seventh state or the thirtieth dilution or the thirty-third degree, or something, for when you got there you were nothing, don’t you know? I was short on Vishnu and I didn’t know beans about Buddha, and for a long time, I am afraid, I gave dear old Billings a great deal of grief. But finally I began to get a new light, and Billings convinced me that there was something in it, and we had some more champagne.