pathy on lines of least resistance, he came to me
with his sorrow.

I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He swore, on his knees
and with tears in his eyes, that if she recovered, if God would give
her back to him, he would never again touch a card; for gambling was
his passion, and even among amateurs he would have been accounted the
softest of soft things. His prayer was answered, she did recover, and he
proceeded to fulfill his vow.

But what was he to do? He had been taught, or at least he had learned,
to do nothing, not even to play poker! I suggested that as running
a restaurant was a French prerogative and that as he knew less about
cooking than about anything else--we had had a contest or two over the
mysteries of a pair of chafing dishes--and as there was not a really
good eating place in Louisville, he should set up a restaurant. It was
said rather in jest than in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the
money. The next thing I knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had
opened The Brunswick.

In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into
day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o'clock supper there. It
was thus and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between
us ripened into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge
of the reserves behind The Major's buoyant optimism and occasional
gasconnade.

He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction
of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph
Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester,
Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard--very nearly all the
celebrities of the day among the outsiders--myself the humble witness
and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived
exceedingly well.

The Major's most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had
been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once
into an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall
Street he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck
story and a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had
not been an inhabitant.

Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major
gave us a most graphic account of how "the old house"--for thus he
designated some commercial establishment, which either had no existence
or which he had some reason fo