wont
to speak of this group as "of high aspirations and peregrinations."
It radiated between Franklin Square, where Joseph W. Harper--"Joe
Brooklyn," we called him--reigned in place of his uncle, Fletcher
Harper, the man of genius among the original Harper Brothers, and the
Lotos Club, then in Irving Place, and Delmonico's, at the corner of
Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, with Sutherland's in Liberty Street
for a downtown place of luncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon's in
Fulton Market.

[Illustration: General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C.S.A.--Killed
in Georgia June 14, 1864--P.E. Bishop of Louisiana]

The Harper contingent, beside its chief, embraced Tom Nast and William
A. Seaver, whom John Russell Young named "Papa Pendennis," and pictured
as "a man of letters among men of the world and a man of the world among
men of letters," a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor Johnson, and
Major Constable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and not a bookman,
yet had known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the family of
Edinburgh publishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from California.
Whitelaw Reid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was beginning to
make himself felt in journalism. John Hay played high priest to the
revels. Occasionally I made a pious pilgrimage to the delightful shrine.

Truth to tell, it emulated rather the gods than the graces, though all
of us had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late
at night; and Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield and Murat
Halstead from Cincinnati to join us. Howells, always something of a
prig, living in Boston, held himself at too high account; but often we
had Joseph Jefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a
while Edwin Booth, who could not quite trust himself to go our gait.
The fine fellows we caught from oversea were innumerable, from the elder
Sothern and Sala and Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton. Times
went very well those days, and whilst some looked on askance, notably
Curtis and, rather oddly, Stedman, and thought we were wasting time
and convivializing more than was good for us, we were mostly young and
hearty, ranging from thirty to five and forty years of age, with amazing
capabilities both for work and play, and I cannot recall that any hurt
to any of us came of it.

Although robustious, our fribbles were harmless enough--ebullitions of
animal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety ungua