I shook his hand at parting, and as we stood looking at each other in the shadow of the evening I asked him: 

“Are you afraid to die?”

“Say, brother, but I’m not,” he returned.  “It hasn’t any terror for me at all.  I’m just as willing.  My, but I’m willing.”

He smiled and gripped me heartily again, and, as I was starting to go, said: 

“If I die tonight, it’ll be all right.  He’ll use me just as long as He needs me.  That I know.  Good-by.”

“Good-by,” I called back.

He hung by his fence, looking down upon the city.  As I turned the next corner I saw him awakening from his reflection and waddling stolidly back into the house.

My Brother Paul

I like best to think of him as he was at the height of his all-too-brief reputation and success, when, as the author and composer of various American popular successes ("On the Banks of the Wabash,” “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” and various others), as a third owner of one of the most successful popular music publishing houses in the city and as an actor and playwright of some small repute, he was wont to spin like a moth in the white light of Broadway.  By reason of a little luck and some talent he had come so far, done so much for himself.  In his day he had been by turn a novitiate in a Western seminary which trained aspirants for the Catholic priesthood; a singer and entertainer with a perambulating cure-all oil troupe or wagon ("Hamlin’s Wizard Oil”) traveling throughout Ohio, Indiana and Illinois; both end- and middle-man with one, two or three different minstrel companies of repute; the editor or originator and author of a “funny column” in a Western small city paper; the author of the songs mentioned and a hundred others; a black-face monologue artist; a white-face ditto, at Tony Pastor’s, Miner’s and Niblo’s of the old days; a comic lead; co-star and star in such melodramas and farces as “The Danger Signal,” “The Two Johns,” “A Tin Soldier,” “The Midnight Bell,” “A Green Goods Man” (a farce which he himself wrote, by the way), and others.  The man had a genius for the kind of gayety, poetry and romance which may, and no doubt must be, looked upon as exceedingly middle-class but which nonetheless had as much charm as anything in this world can well have.  He had at this time absolutely no cares or financial worries of any kind, and this plus his health, self-amusing disposition and talent for entertaining, made him a most fascinating figure to contemplate.

My first recollection of him is of myself as a boy often and he a man of twenty-five (my oldest brother).  He had come back to the town in which we were then living solely to find his mother and help her.  Six or seven years before he had left without any explanation as to where he was going, tired of or irritated by the routine of a home which for any genuine opportunity it offered him might as well never have existed.  It was run dominantly by my father in