looking down on the mills and the driving force of
self-interest--on greed, lust, love of pleasure, all their fantastic and
yet moving dreams.

"I'm an ignorant man myself, and I don't know all," he went on, "and I'd
like to study. My, but I'd like to look into all things, but I can't do
it now. We can't stop until this thing is straightened out. Some time,
maybe," and he looked peacefully away.

"By the way," I said, "whatever became of the man to whom you gave your
rubber boots over on Fisher's Island?"

His face lit up as if it were the most natural thing that I should know
about it.

"Say," he exclaimed, in the most pleased and confidential way, as if we
were talking about a mutual friend, "I saw him not long ago. And, do you
know, he's a good man now--really, he is. Sober and hard-working. And,
say, would you believe it, he told me that I was the cause of it--just
that miserable old pair of rubber boots--what do you think of that?"

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 middl