Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/64

48 very obliteration of my name which I was trying to avoid. He proposed that I accept a partnership in his concern on a most generous basis, but that the name of the company remain as it was, merely Corvet and Spearman. Spearman's influence and mine prevailed upon him to allow my name to appear; since then, the firm name has been Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman.

"Our friendship had strengthened and ripened during those years. The intense activity of Corvet's mind, which as a younger man he had directed wholly to the shipping, was directed, after he had isolated himself in this way, to other things. He took up almost feverishly an immense number of studies—strange studies most of them for a man whose youth had been almost violently active and who had once been a lake captain. I cannot tell you what they all were—geology, ethnology, nearly a score of subjects; he corresponded with various scientific societies; he has given almost the whole of his attention to such things for about twenty years. Since I have known him, he has transformed himself from the rather rough, uncouth—though always spiritually minded—man he was when I first met him into an educated gentleman whom anybody would be glad to know; but he has made very few acquaintances in that time, and has kept almost none of his old friendships. He has lived alone in the house on Astor Street with only one servant—the same one all these years.

"The only house he has visited with any frequency has been mine. He has always liked my wife; he had—he has a great affection for my daughter, who, when she was a child, ran in and out of his home as she pleased. He would take long walks with her; he'd come here sometimes in the afternoon to have tea with her on