“Writing,” declared the old doctor, after a talk about De Quincey, “is functional.” He had many pet theories or hobbies on which he loved to expatiate. “Writing is as much a function of the system as breathing or excretion. What the body takes in and cannot use, it discards. What the mind takes in and cannot use, it, similarly, excretes. A sensitive, impressionable mind receives an incessant bombardment, often an intense, terrific bombardment of impressions. Two-thirds of such impressions are never digested, much less used. The artist-temperament whose sensitiveness accumulates a vast store, uses them; the real artist, of course, shapes them at the same time. The ordinary man, the _Dutzend Mensch_, made in bundles by the dozen, gets few impressions, and needs, naturally, no outlet.... Writing is purely functional....” It was one of his numerous pet theories. I went to his house now every night; he gave me his professional care, he gave me sympathy, he gave me food. Pathetic, wonderful old German! His tenderness was a woman’s, his temper a demon’s. I felt a giant in him somewhere. At close daily quarters his alternate moods perplexed me utterly. He had an Irish wife, a kind, motherly, but quite uneducated woman of about forty-five, and a little girl of eight or nine, whose white face looked as old as her mother’s, and whose diminutive figure seemed to me unusual somewhere. Was it not stunted? Her intelligence, her odd ways, her brilliant eyes captivated me. She called me “Uncle Diedel.” She talked, like her mother, broken German. Supper, an extremely simple meal, but a feast to me, was always in the basement kitchen. The tiny wooden house, owning something akin to squatter’s rights which prevented its demolition, stood in the next block to my own, hemmed in by “brownstone fronts,” but with a miniature garden. New York, that burns anthracite coal, has no blacks and smuts; the trees and shrubs were really green; the earth smelt sweet. The little house, standing back from the road, was a paradise to me. Its one ground-floor apartment was divided by folding doors into consulting- and waiting-rooms. But no patients came, or came so rarely that it was an event when the door-bell rang. The doctor had the greatest difficulty in keeping himself and family alive. At supper I used to eat as little as possible. He seemed a competent physician. I wondered greatly. As well as real human kindness, there was courage in that little building; there was also a great tragedy I sensed long before I discovered its solution. The strange innocence and ignorance of my up-bringing still clung to me.