ite another
light, because he was there. Very swiftly he found a wondrous canal
running right through it, under its market even, and we went walking
along its banks, out into the woods and fields. He found or created out
of an existing boardinghouse in a back street so colorful and gay a
thing that after a time it seemed to me to outdo that one of
Philadelphia. He joined a country club near Passaic, on the river of
that name, on the veranda of which we often dined. He found a Chinese
quarter with a restaurant or two; an amazing Italian section with a
restaurant; a man who had a $40,000 collection of rare Japanese and
Chinese curios, all in his rooms at the Essex County Insane Asylum, for
he was the chemist there; a man who was a playwright and manager in New
York; another who owned a newspaper syndicate; another who directed a
singing society; another who was president of a gun club; another who
owned and made or rather fired pottery for others. Peter was so restless
and vital that he was always branching out in a new direction. To my
astonishment he now took up the making and firing of pottery for
himself, being interested in reproducing various Chinese dishes and
vases of great beauty, the originals of which were in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. His plan was first to copy the design, then buy, shape or
bake the clay at some pottery, then paint or decorate with liquid
porcelain at his own home, and fire. In the course of six or eight
months, working in his rooms Saturdays and Sundays and some mornings
before going to the office, he managed to produce three or four which
satisfied him and which he kept plates of real beauty. The others he
gave away.

A little later, if you please, it was Turkish rug-making on a small
scale, the frame and materials for which he slowly accumulated, and then
providing himself with a pillow, Turkish-fashion, he crossed his legs
before it and began slowly but surely to produce a rug, the colors and
design of which were entirely satisfactory to me. As may be imagined, it
was slow and tedious work, undertaken at odd moments and when there was
nothing else for him to do, always when the light was good and never at
night, for he maintained that the coloring required the best of light.
Before this odd, homely, wooden machine, a combination of unpainted rods
and cords, he would sit, cross-legged or on a bench at times, and pound
and pick and tie and unravel--a most wearisome-looking task to me.