was an American Catholic, rather strict and narrow.  His brothers and sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later, astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild, unsettled type.  They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving—­so vital that they weighed on one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do.  One of the brothers, K——­, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter’s sake, was so intense, nervous, rapid-talking, rapid-living, that he frightened me a little.  He loved noisy, garish places.  He liked to play the piano, stay up very late; he was a high liver, a “good dresser,” as the denizens of the Tenderloin would say, an excellent example of the flashy, clever promoter.  He was always representing a new company, introducing something—­a table or laxative water, a shaving soap, a chewing gum, a safety razor, a bicycle, an automobile tire or the machine itself.  He was here, there, everywhere—­in Waukesha, Wisconsin; San Francisco; New York; New Orleans.  “My, my!  This is certainly interesting!” he would exclaim, with an air which would have done credit to a comedian and extending both hands.  “Peter’s pet friend, Dreiser!  Well, well, well!  Let’s have a drink.  Let’s have something to eat.  I’m only in town for a day.  Maybe you’d like to go to a show—­or hit the high places?  Would you?  Well, well, well!  Let’s make a night of it!  What do you say?” and he would fix me with a glistening, nervous and what was intended no doubt to be a reassuring eye, but which unsettled me as thoroughly as the imminence of an earthquake.  But I was talking of Peter.

The day I first saw him he was bent over a drawing-board illustrating a snake story for one of the Sunday issues of the Globe-Democrat, which apparently delighted in regaling its readers with most astounding concoctions of this kind, and the snake he was drawing was most disturbingly vital and reptilian, beady-eyed, with distended jaws, extended tongue, most fatefully coiled.

“My,” I commented in passing, for I was in to see him about another matter, “what a glorious snake!”

“Yes, you can’t make ’em too snaky for the snake-editor up front,” he returned, rising and dusting tobacco from his lap and shirtfront, for he was in his shirt-sleeves.  Then he expectorated not in but to one side of a handsome polished brass cuspidor which contained not the least evidence of use, the rubber mat upon which it stood being instead most disturbingly “decorated.”  I was most impressed by this latter fact although at the time I said nothing, being too new.  Later, I may as well say here, I discovered why.  This was a bit of his clowning humor, a purely manufactured and as it were mechanical joke or ebullience of soul.  If any one inadvertently or through unfamiliarity attempted to expectorate in his “golden cuspidor,” as he described it, he was always quick to rise and interpose in the most solemn, almost sepulchral manner, at the same time raising a hand.  “Hold!  Out—­not in—­to one side, on the mat!  That cost me seven dollars!” Then he would solemnly seat himself and begin to draw again.  I saw him do this to all but the chiefest of the authorities of the paper.  And all, even the dullest, seemed to be amused, quite fascinated by the utter trumpery folly of it.