IV


It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York, where
there was already gathered a congenial group to meet and greet him. John
Hay, quoting old Jack Dade's description of himself, was 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;