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could get his compensation, or whether they'd come about the parkways, or whether they were public officers. They all stopped short. Utter silence would reign while Seabury went out to lunch. Everybody stopped and looked. Traffic stopped and fell away. He walked through it with his head in the air going out to lunch. Nobody said a thing. That was that.

It was strange, but I saw it over and over again. I remember I began to say to my friends uptown, “I wonder if anybody who looks like that and who is able to strut around like that can actually understand the shortcomings of human beings who find themselves in positions of temptation, or positions of trust? I wonder if he understands what ignorance, stupidity and frustration do to a man? I wonder if he's really able to make a fair estimate of what the realities of the situation are? Does he understand that a man can be both crooked and kind? How is he going to cope with these people?”

I knew him personally. I occasionally met him at dinner. I saw him at the Howells at dinner on Christmas night one year. The person who said the strange thing that night was his brother, who I guess had had one drink too much. I had said to the brother, William Seabury, beside whom I sat that it had been a wonderful Christmas; such good will prevailed throughout the city, that I had been much impressed