e-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 the interest of religious and moral
theories, with which this boy had little sympathy. He was probably not
understood by any one save my mother, who understood or at least
sympathized with us all. Placed in a school which was to turn him out a
priest, he had decamped, and now seven years later was here in this
small town, with fur coat and silk hat, a smart cane--a gentleman of the
theatrical profession. He had joined a minstrel show somewhere and had
become an "end-man." He had suspected that we were not as fortunate in
this world's goods as might be and so had returned. His really great
heart had called him.

But the thing which haunts me, and which was typical of him then as
throughout life, was the spirit which he then possessed and conveyed. It
was one of an agile geniality, unmarred by thought of a serious
character but warm and genuinely tender and with a taste for simple
beauty which was most impressive. He was already the author of a cheap
songbook, "_The Paul Dresser Songster_" ("All the Songs Sung in the
Show"), an