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HIS KEEPER. 

During childhood I was constantly my brother's companion and at times practically his keeper. As he seemed to care for me in his own crazy fashion I alone could influence him. My mother, in order to prove to herself and others that he was quite normal, insisted on taking him out driving. When his unkept appearance made this impossible, she would send for me and armed with a pair of long scissors, I would out as best I could the great tangled mass of hair and beard. Perhaps I could even persuade him to change his soiled overcoat which he persisted in wearing in and out of doors. It was I, also, who kept him from leaning over and gazing down into dark, deep places, and prevented his drinking strange concoctions which he had brewed for himself out of leaves and flowers. 

To him any steep incline led to an abyss and was either to be taken at a rush with bated breath or averted altogether. I remember an instance in Switzerland when for hours I tried to persuade him, as he crouched in the snow like a bit black-beetle, to descend a steep hill. What did he fear. Perhaps the inevitable disillusion that a great and fearsome adventure would lead only to the hotel.

One day as we were dining together, St. Amar saw an aggressor standing behind my chair. Suddenly a large dinner knife came whirling across the table, barely missing me by a few inches. So intent was he on self-defense that he neither noticed my presence nor saw me changing quickly my place.

Another time when alone with my brother in a villa on the Riviera (my mother was living in an adjoining villa) I was awakened in the night by the smell of burning. Jumping out of bed and rushing to my brother's room I found him completely nude; leaning over his bed with a lighted candle in his hand he was trying to burn his nightshirt. I asked him