d some copies of this he had with him, one of which he gave
me. But we having no musical instrument of any kind, he taught me some
of the melodies "by ear." The home in which by force of poverty we were
compelled to live was most unprepossessing and inconvenient, and the
result of his coming could but be our request for, or at least the
obvious need of, assistance. Still he was as much an enthusiastic part
of it as though he belonged to it. He was happy in it, and the cause of
his happiness was my mother, of whom he was intensely fond. I recall how
he hung about her in the kitchen or wherever she happened to be, how
enthusiastically he related all his plans for the future, his amusing
difficulties in the past. He was very grand and youthfully
self-important, or so we all thought, and still he patted her on the
shoulder or put his arm about her and kissed her. Until she died years
later she was truly his uppermost thought, crying with her at times over
her troubles and his. He contributed regularly to her support and sent
home all his cast-off clothing to be made over for the younger ones.
(Bless her tired hands!)

As I look back now on my life, I realize quite clearly that of all the
members of my family, subsequent to my mother's death, the only one who
truly understood me, or, better yet, sympathized with my intellectual
and artistic point of view, was, strange as it may seem, this same Paul,
my dearest brother. Not that he was in any way fitted intellectually or
otherwise to enjoy high forms of art and learning and so guide me, or
that he understood, even in later years (long after I had written
"Sister Carrie," for instance), what it was that I was attempting to do;
he never did. His world was that of the popular song, the middle-class
actor or comedian, the middle-class comedy, and such humorous aesthetes
of the writing world as Bill Nye, Petroleum V. Nasby, the authors of the
Spoopendyke Papers, and "Samantha at Saratoga." As far as I could make
out--and I say this in no lofty, condescending spirit, by any means--he
was entirely full of simple, middle-class romance, middle-class humor,
middle-class tenderness and middle-class grossness, all of which I am
very free to say early disarmed and won me completely and kept me so
much his debtor that I should hesitate to try to acknowledge or explain
all that he did for or meant to me.

Imagine, if you can, a man weighing all of three hundred pounds, not
more than five f