rywhere
breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in
restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and
their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships--At
times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants--which was an
injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently
futile and aimless striving.

My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our
six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in
a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm
trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low--you know the kind, we
saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and
we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for
father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do
the housework so that we can visit her often,"--and so on and on!

Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it
really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was
drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my
stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to
drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives
seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way.

It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that
Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years
before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale,
hungry looking boy at this time and had just written _The Red Badge of
Courage_, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his
second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half
from the keep of a cruel typist.

He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript
in his ulster. Now it was _The Men in the Storm_, now a bunch of _The
Black Riders_, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and
while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council
over his dark future.

"You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found
small comfort in that prospect.

To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing
the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical--for my study was
the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty
dollars per month. Stil