This would be after
we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and
soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth,
and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come
away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-
shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer.
Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York together,
and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing a
syllable till we had occasion to say, "Well, we're there." Then, with
our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel
environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could
not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he
always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the
story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights
story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over
again. Or at times he would reason high--
"Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,"
walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.
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