blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a frown, as if before something unbearable, as if before something revolting.  There was imagination in that hard skull of his, over which the thick clustering hair fitted like a cap.  As to me, I have no imagination (I would be more certain about him today, if I had), and I do not mean to imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land uprising above the white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what I—­returning with no bones broken, so to speak—­had done with my very young brother.  I could not make such a mistake.  I knew very well he was of those about whom there is no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow.  The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives.  Woe to the stragglers!  We exist only in so far as we hang together.  He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man’s more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a tree.  I happened to be handy, and I happened to be touched.  That’s all there is to it.  I was concerned as to the way he would go out.  It would have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink.  The earth is so small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed, swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes, and with a flutter of rags about the elbows, who, on the strength of old acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars.  You know the awful jaunty bearing of these scarecrows coming to you from a decent past, the rasping careless voice, the half-averted impudent glances—­those meetings more trying to a man who believes in the solidarity of our lives than the sight of an impenitent death-bed to a priest.  That, to tell you the truth, was the only danger I could see for him and for me; but I also mistrusted my want of imagination.  It might even come to something worse, in some way it was beyond my powers of fancy to foresee.  He wouldn’t let me forget how imaginative he was, and your imaginative people swing farther in any direction, as if given a longer scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life.  They do.  They take to drink too.  It may be I was belittling him by such a fear.  How could I tell?  Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic.  I only knew he was one of us.  And what business had he to be romantic?  I am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused reflections because there remains so little to be told of him.  He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you.  I’ve led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you.  Were my commonplace fears unjust?  I won’t say—­not even now.  You may be able to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of the game.  At any rate, they were superfluous.  He did not go out, not at all; on the contrary, he