Page:Life of Isaiah V Williamson.djvu/170

146 around Bank and Elbow Lane, with bowed head and hands behind his back, carrying the same old umbrella with its years of associations, and plainly absorbed in deep thought. It was represented that except on rare occasions when he put on his old high hat and "best suit" to go to Clover Hill or elsewhere, he was usually seen in the same old suit, well worn, even shabby and ragged; and wearing a disreputable derby hat pulled well down to his ears, his thin white hair straggling out under its brim. And if Henry Lewis, or some other intimate friend, ventured a bantering remark: "I. V., you ought to get a new suit of clothes!" he would remark in the same facetious vein: "What's the matter with these? Don't they fit me all right?"

He was described in his little dingy back office, on Bank Street, where he spent thirty-five years or so, with its plain desk, three or four old trunks—relics of the European trip—stuffed with records and papers, its bare walls, and its general air of being a catch-all for rubbish—including the very shabby handbag in which the particular papers of the day were carried back and forth between the office