In Henry Bergh—a reformed dilettante who founded the A.S.P.C.A.—many saw a latter-day Saint Francis of Assisi. But others, especially the cruel or the thoughtless, regarded him as The Great Meddler.
On an unseasonably warm evening in April, 1866, a well-tailored gentleman with a drooping mustache and a long, thin, face, obviously a member of the “upper ten,” stood at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street in New York City, watching the tangle of traffic