I first saw him at a political meeting during my first few weeks in St. Louis, and the manner in which he arose, the way in which he addressed his hearers, the way in which they listened to him, all impressed me. Subsequently, being sent to his house, I found him in his small front parlor, a yellow plush album on the marble-topped center table, horse-hair furniture about the room, a red carpet, crayon enlargements of photographs of his mother and father. But what force in the man! What innate gentility of manner and speech! He seemed like a prince disguised as a blacksmith. “So ye’ve come to interview me,” he said soothingly. “Ye’re from the _Globe-Democrat_—well, that paper’s no particular friend of mine, but ye can’t help that, can ye?” and then he told me whatever it was I wanted to know, giving me no least true light, you may be sure. At the conclusion he offered me a drink, which I refused. As I was about to leave he surveyed me pleasantly and tolerantly. “Ye’re a likely lad,” he said, laying an immense hand on one of my lean shoulders, “and ye’re jest startin’ out in life, I can see that. Well, be a good boy. Ye’re in the newspaper business, where ye can make friends or enemies just as ye choose, and if ye behave yerself right ye can just as well make friends. Come an’ see me some time. I like yer looks. I’m always here av an evenin’, when I’m not attendin’ a meetin’ av some kind, right here in this little front room, or in the kitchen with me wife. I might be able to do something fer ye sometime—remember that. I’ve a good dale av influence here. Ye’ll have to write what ye’re told, I know that, so I won’t be offended. So come an’ see me, an’ remember that I want nothin’ av ye,” and he gently ushered me out and closed the door behind me. But I never went, at least not for anything for myself. The one time I asked him for a position for a friend who wanted to work on the local street-cars as a conductor he wrote across the letter: “Give this man what he wants.” It was wretchedly scrawled (the man brought it back to me before presenting it) and was signed “edward butler.” But the man was given the place at once. Although Butler was an earnest Catholic, he was supposed to control and tax the vice of the city; which charge may or may not have been true. One of his sons owned and managed the leading vaudeville house in the city, a vulgar burlesque theater, at which the ticket taker was Frank James, brother of the amazing Jesse who terrorized Missouri and the Southwest as an outlaw at one time and enriched endless dime novel publishers afterward. As dramatic critic of the _Globe-Democrat_ later I often saw him. Butler’s son, a more or less stodgy type of Tammany politician, popular with a certain element in St. Louis, was later elected to Congress.