Twelve Men

"A dog," he said very distinctly and in his most cynical tone and apparently apropos of nothing, which usually augured that the lightning of his criticism was about to strike so...

Well, the weeks passed, and to mark progress he occasionally sent me clippings of telegrams, cut not from his pages, if you please, but from such austere journals as the _Sun_ a...

I jumped up. They were my words! It was Paul's song! He had another "hit" then--"On the Banks of the Wabash," and they were singing it in the streets already! I leaned out of th...

But on Friday, as I was talking with some one at my desk, a telegram was handed me. It was from Mrs. Peter and read: "Peter died today at two of pneumonia. Please come."

As the days passed various other things happened. For one thing, he tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window of his studio in New York; for another, he tried to take p...

However that may be, here was the major a suppliant for his services, and here was he, Culhane, and although the major was paying well for his minute room and his probably great...

"What do you expect?" he once said to me, after I had made a very careful study of his career for a current magazine, which, curiously, was never published. I was trying to get...

"There'll be plenty av work fer ye to do without ever yer layin' a hand to a pick er shovel," he replied comfortingly. "Shewer, that's no work fer white min. Let the nagurs do i...

Id never had any money, friends or relatives, and was always troubled with illness or hunger in some form or other, and yet the doctor always spoke of him sympathetically as "Po...

Even more remarkable than himself, however, was his store. I have seen many in my time that were striking because of their neatness; I never saw one before that struck me as mor...

An incident, even more ridiculous, but illustrative of the atmosphere in which Rourke dwelt, occurred at Highbridge one frosty October Sunday morning, where because of seepage f...

"Now, here's an illustration of what I mean," Culhane began, apropos of nothing at all, "when I say that the word man ought to be modified or changed in some way so that when we...

"Well, your Honor," resumed the speaker, indifferently following his own oratorical bent, the while the company surveyed him, amused and smiling, "this man has always earned an...

Always of a reverent, although not exactly religious, turn of mind, he took considerable interest in religious ministration, though he steadily and persistently refused, in his...

"I don't know anything about your friend or what he told you. If he told you you could order a room by telegraph, he's mistaken. Anyhow, you're not dealing with him, but with me...

But there was one phase of all this which interested Peter immensely. Were there on sale in St. Louis any bits of jade, silks, needlework, porcelains, basketry or figurines of t...

But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he seemed to me to gradually lose sigh...

"I don't know, unless it is that I've found out what I ought to do. You see, I need so very little for myself that I couldn't be very unhappy."

One of the next interesting impressions I gained of the doctor was that of seeing him hobbling about our town on crutches, his medicine case held in one hand along with a crutch...

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, unmar...

Toward the last, however, a natural calm set in, the result no doubt of weariness and a sense of surfeit, which sent the building forward apace. During this time Rourke was to b...

It was while he was in Philadelphia that he told me the beginnings of the love affair which eventually ended in his marrying and settling down into the homiest of home men I hav...

But, as I have said, I always prefer to think of him at this, the very apex or tower window of his life. For most of this period he was gay and carefree. The music company of wh...

In any group of men I have ever known, speaking from the point of view of character and not that of physical appearance, Peter would stand out as deliciously and irrefutably dif...

Now followed the kind of trivialities by which most human feuds are furthered. The first test of strength came when a vagrant evangelist from Alabama arrived and desired to use...

M----'s idea, as he always said, was to spend and to live, only it wasn't. He merely induced others so to do. One of his customs (and it must have impressed L---- very much, inn...

My friend de Shay, being the fidus Achates of the host, had the power to reveal the inner mysteries of this place to me, and on one or two occasions when there were not so many...

In the city was a gas corporation, originally capitalized at $45,000, and subsequently increased to $75,000, which was earning that year the actual sum of $58,000 over and above...

"It was this way," he said. "My grandfather was a baron. My father was the younger of two brothers. His brother got the title and what was left of the estate. That he managed to...