Alicia is convalescent again, _laus Domini_, and Jimmie is now running about the little house filling it with noise—which is music to my ears. Laura and Randolph have fortunately thus far escaped infection. Jimmie is wanting to resume "wolling up and down" the slope again, but this is still _verboten_.
I can now take up my journeys into town again and I note with a pang that I am growing shabby. The yearly purchases of clothes had been as regular with me as my meals, but I have ordered no clothes for the spring or summer. Odd, what a deleterious effect the shabbiness of clothes has upon one’s consciousness! The tinge of inferiority it brings touches some very tender places in one’s spirit, almost like a shabby conscience. But the doctor of the neighborhood, a contemplative fellow who obviously knows his business, though he talks of his laboratory and his experiments like an alchemist, has earned the clothes that I must do without. And of the two I needed them more.
My search is ended. There is jubilation in my heart again. I have fallen into a livelihood; like the bricklayer who used to fare forth, dinner pail in hand, I have found work.
And the way of it was an odd little stroke of Fate, a whimsicality that would have pleased the ironic soul of Thomas Hardy.
An old college friend of mine, Minot Blackden, whom I used to call Leonardo da Vinci because he was so full of ideas and inventions, had rediscovered, he said, the art of glass-staining. After a five years’ residence in Italy, on a modest patrimony, most of which had gone into glass or into stain, he had returned to his native land and set up a shop _à la_ William Morris somewhere in the region of Bleecker Street, and proceeded to stain glass. He had had some newspaper publicity recently, and there were cuts of his work.
While passing a church in my hot and dusty peregrinations, it occurred to me that here might be a chance of serving him and also myself. By writing an interesting booklet about his craft, illustrating it profusely and sending it with personal letters to all the vestries in the country, I might bring a flood of custom to his shop. It is with this forlorn proposal that I was blundering about to discover Minot Blackden. I failed to find his shop, but I came face to face with my old Salmon and Byrd acquaintance, Signor Visconti.