To catch his eye in a company or at a public gathering was always dangerous, for if he was bored or some tedious matter was forward, he would seek relief by appealing to a friend with a slight lifting of the brows, or a telepathic reference to some similar situation in the past. As he walked the streets with a companion his comments upon people and trifling incidents of street traffic were often in his best humorous vein. With his intimates he had a fashion of taking up without prelude subjects that had been dropped weeks before. He was greatly given to assuming characters and assigning parts to his friends in the little comedies he was always creating. For years his favorite rôle was that of a rural preacher of a type that had doubtless aroused his animosity in youth. He built up a real impression of this character--a cadaverous person of Gargantuan appetite, clad in a long black alpaca coat, who arrived at farmhouses at meal-times and depleted the larder, while the children of the household, awaiting the second table in trepidation, gloomily viewed the havoc through the windows. One or another of us would be Brother Hotchkiss, or Brother Brookwarble, and we were expected to respond in his own key of bromidic pietism. This device, continually elaborated, was not wholly foolishness on his part, but an expression of his deep-seated contempt for cant and hypocrisy, which he regarded as the most grievous of sins. When he described some “character” he had known, it was with an amount of minute detail that made the person stand forth as a veritable being. Questions from the listener would be welcomed, as evidence of sympathy with the recital and interest in the individual under discussion. As I journeyed homeward with him once from Philadelphia, he began limning for two companions a young lawyer he had known years before at Greenfield. He carried this far into the night, and at the breakfast table was ready with other anecdotes of this extraordinary individual. When the train reached Indianapolis the sketch, vivid and amusing, seemed susceptible of indefinite expansion.