newspaper and other worlds, are wont to gather.  One of his intimates, as I now recall, was “Bat” Masterson, the Western and now retired (to Broadway!) bad man; Muldoon, the famous wrestler; Tod Sloan, the jockey; “Battling” Nelson; James J. Corbett; Kid McCoy; Terry McGovern—­prize-fighters all.  Such Tammany district leaders as James Murphy, “The” McManus, Chrystie and Timothy Sullivan, Richard Carroll, and even Richard Croker, the then reigning Tammany boss, were all on his visiting list.  He went to their meetings, rallies and district doings generally to sing and play, and they came to his “office” occasionally.  Various high and mighties of the Roman Church, “fathers” with fine parishes and good wine cellars, and judges of various municipal courts, were also of his peculiar world.  He was always running to one or the other “to get somebody out,” or they to him to get him to contribute something to something, or to sing and play or act, and betimes they were meeting each other in hotel grills or elsewhere and having a drink and telling “funny stories.”

Apropos of this sense of humor of his, this love of horse-play almost, I remember that once he had a new story to tell—­a vulgar one of course—­and with it he had been making me and a dozen others laugh until the tears coursed down our cheeks.  It seemed new to everybody and, true to his rather fantastic moods, he was determined to be the first to tell it along Broadway.  For some reason he was anxious to have me go along with him, possibly because he found me at that time an unvarying fountain of approval and laughter, possibly because he liked to show me off as his rising brother, as he insisted that I was.  At between six and seven of a spring or summer evening, therefore, we issued from his suite at the Gilsey House, whither he had returned to dress, and invading the bar below were at once centered among a group who knew him.  A whiskey, a cigar, the story told to one, two, three, five, ten to roars of laughter, and we were off, over the way to Weber & Fields (the Musical Burlesque House Supreme of those days) in the same block, where to the ticket seller and house manager, both of whom he knew, it was told.  More laughter, a cigar perhaps.  Then we were off again, this time to the ticket seller of Palmer’s Theater at Thirtieth Street, thence to the bar of the Grand Hotel at Thirty-first, the Imperial at Thirty-second, the Martinique at Thirty-third, a famous drug-store at the southwest corner of Thirty-fourth and Broadway, now gone of course, the manager of which was a friend of his.  It was a warm, moony night, and he took a glass of vichy “for looks’ sake,” as he said.

Then to the quondam Hotel Aulic at Thirty-fifth and Broadway—­the center and home of the then much-berated “Hotel Aulic or Actors’ School of Philosophy,” and a most impressive actors’ rendezvous where might have been seen in the course of an evening all the “second leads” and “light comedians” and “heavies” of this, that and the other road company, all blazing with startling clothes and all explaining how they “knocked ’em” here and there:  in Peoria, Pasadena, Walla-Walla and where not.  My brother shone like a star when only one is in the sky.