Everybody laughed at the tale of this ... at first Spalton himself laughed, our American spirit of rough joking and horse-play gaining the uppermost in him ... but then he recalled to mind the seriousness of our practical joke, and burned with anger at us over what we had done. And he threatened to "fire" on the spot anyone who ever again molested "Crazy" Speedwell....
"Old Pfeiler" we called him....
Pfeiler had attended one of Spalton's lectures at Chicago.
Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth and travel....
He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton's lecture. Spalton brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios.
There he found that the queer, gentle, old man was as helpless as a child ... all he could be trusted to do was to write addresses on letters ... which he was set at, not too exactingly....
I never saw so happy a man as Pfeiler was that winter.
He was a Buddhist, not by pose, but by sincere conviction. He thought, also, that the Koran was a greater book than the Bible ... and more miraculous ... "one man, Mohammed, who left a work of greater beauty than the combined efforts of the several hundred who gave us that hodge-podge, the Bible."