I was first introduced to him by a burly Swede, with hands like beef-steaks, and the shoulders of a heavy-weight fighter, who was later arrested and sent to gaol for picking pockets. His notoriety as a sneak-thief none of us had guessed, and how those bulky hands could have accomplished anything neat and clever was a puzzle. In the Scotsman’s pleasant quarters, somewhat outlandishly furnished by himself on a top floor, the Swede had made himself at home too long. Brodie, the prey of many who, invited for a day or two, stayed on for weeks, was glad to see his back. His weak good-nature, refusing to turn his guests out, was the cause of endless troubles with men who sponged upon his kindness and his purse. This and his eau de Cologne business, “me beezness” as he called it, were his sole topics of conversation. He had money to spend--was it an allowance? We never knew--and was always well dressed; many a square meal he stood me; there was something in his soft West of Scotland voice that drew me to this odd fish in the “perfumery line.” It reminded me of happier days. And I have described his habits at some length, because it was owing to a small service I rendered him, and rendered myself at the same time, that I became a partner in “me beezness” of manufacturing and selling eau de Cologne made from the Johann Maria Farina recipe. Brodie’s social aspirations were very marked; to hear him talk one would have thought him heir to a dukedom; he had, too, a curious faculty for getting his name associated with people above him in the social world. How he managed it was a problem I never solved. His instinct for smelling out and using such folk was a gift from heaven. To see his name in the paper gave him supreme happiness. Real “Society” of course, Ward Macallister’s Four Hundred, lay beyond the reach of what was actually a peasant type, but there were less select fields he worked assiduously with great success. There was matter for a play, a novel, a character study, at any rate, in Brodie, who himself, I learned much later, had come out to New York as valet to Clyde Fitch, the playwright, and whose recipe for the “genuine Johann Maria Farina,” his successful “beezness,” was stolen property. My father’s son knew certainly queer bedfellows in that underworld in New York City.