“Leave the great step at the southern end of the Grand Gallery—a yard high and a yard plus a cubit wide—and we find stretching across the ante-chamber a granite leaf, of two blocks slid in vertical grooves. On the upper of these blocks is the only ornament in the pyramid—a boss, nearly semi-circular in face—exactly an inch high and an inch in westerly displacement from the centre of the leaf. The cubic contents of this inch-high boss are one pint. Its volume of water weighs just one pound. The inch, the pint, the pound, so often changed, so often lost; restored by one method and verified after such restoration, by the boss on the leaf which bars the way in the ante-chamber! The base of the boss is a chord of five inches or a span; its centre one sacred cubit or five spans from the hidden end of the leaf. The top block, apparently irregular in upper outline, is 41.2 inches long, 15.7 wide, and 48.57 in mean height, giving a contents in cubic inches of 31,415.9-၊-, which contains the relation between the diameter and the circumference of a circle. The lower block has a contents of exactly one-fourth of the coffer, or an Anglo-Saxon ‘quarter’. On this leaf, by reference to the boss, we find also recorded or prophesied the twenty-four inch gauge and the three-foot rule, as well as that sacred cubit of twenty-five inches, which is commensurable with the polar diameter of the earth.
“The base of the boss is five, the central one of the nine digits, a number so hated by the Egyptians, even of the present day, as to be marked by them with a 0 on their watches—but the sacred number of the Shepherd Kings, who embodied it in the five-sided, five-angled, five-proportioned monument which they came so far to build, and which was the key to the proportions and dimensions of that Temple in which the five books of Moses were sacred to a people who left the land of their oppressors, five abreast, ‘with high hands,’ with outspread fingers, flaunting their number in the faces of the Egyptians, to whom it brought so much bad luck.
“From the Pentalpha or five-pointed star may be reproduced the pyramid and the Temple proportions and those of the perfect human body—for this being inscribed in a circle, the centre of the star and circle being at the pubis, the arms and legs spread out easily just reach the points of the star—the centre of the breast being midway from the pubis to the crown of the head, and the base of the knee-cap midway from the pubis to the sole of the foot. The pyramid diagram gives the correct proportions of the human body with equal exactness and detail.”
I felt attracted to this man who drew so freely from an apparently inexhaustible mental storehouse, and who so logically connected facts as to weave from mere numbers so wondrous a fabric; but I dared not intrude my callow personality upon one so well-rounded. As we went down the smooth stone steps, his foot slipped, and he would have fallen headlong had I not been fortunate enough to catch and support him. Even as it was, he wrenched his foot, so that he gladly accepted my proffered assistance to his car.
It turned out that he, too, went down town, although further than I; and we entered the same surface car. He honored me by a request for an exchange of cards; and on the one which he handed me I read the name “Roger Brathwaite”; no address being given, although I learned from him that he resided in one of those old wards, once fashionable, where still a few old-fashioned people of means live in commodious old dwellings, and refuse to be crowded out by factory and warehouse, be they never so lofty and noisy by day, never so lonely and gloomy by night.
Some three weeks later, I met Brathwaite in the street, and in walking with him, for a few blocks, learned that he had been a friend of my grandfather—whose name I bore in full. He told me that he had been inquiring concerning me, of my employers, and of others; and that he had had such good reports that he wished me to call upon him the next afternoon, at the address which he now gave, and where, he remarked, he wished to make a business proposition which might be to my advantage.
It is needless to say that before the hour appointed, I bent my steps towards the place of meeting.
The house was one of those ugly comfortable-looking four-story and basement brick structures, with generous doors and wide and abundant windows, which the wealthy New Yorker of three generations ago, be he merchant prince or landed proprietor, built for himself and intended for his descendants, but which have been crowded out of notice by towering factories, storehouses and tenement buildings. Its wide granite steps and curiously-wrought iron railings, its great doorway, upheld by pairs of fluted pillars enclosing narrow lights at each side of the silver-handled single door, and capped by a semi-circular transom, whispered of the quiet dignified early days of the century; while the puffing of the exhaust steam across the way, and the snarling and buzzing of the machinery in the piano factory next door, spoke of its noisy and commonplace close.
Musk-rose and woodbine formerly luxuriated in its garden; star-proof elms once threw blue-tinted moonlight shadows on its now-mellowing walls; and high-bred dames once trod with dainty feet its smooth and polished floors. The glory of the neighborhood, like that of Ichabod, had departed—but the scrupulous neatness of the old mansion stood out among the dirt and squalor of its surroundings.
In response to my ring, the door was opened by a grave and quiet maid-servant of the olden school; capped, aproned and slippered, with gray hairs thickly sprinkling the brown. On learning my name she directed me to ascend to the study in the fourth story, where I would have no difficulty in finding the master of the house.