Knickerbocker Petronius--The Early Life of Mr. Ward McAllister--A
Discovery of Europe--A Glimpse of British High Life--The Judgment of a
Diplomat--The South and Newport--Organizing New York Society--The
"Four Hundred"--Maxims of a Master and Maitre d'Hotel.

He does not reign in Russia cold,
Nor yet in far Cathay,
But o'er this town he's come to hold
An undisputed sway.

When in their might the ladies rose,
"To put the Despot down,"
As blandly as Ah Sin, he goes
His way without a frown.

Alas! though he's but one alone,
He's one too many still--
He's fought the fight, he's held his own,
And to the end he will.

--_From a Lady after the Ball of February 25, 1884._

Mrs. Burton Harrison, in "Recollections, Grave and Gay," told of a visit
made in 1892 as one of a party of invited guests travelling by special
train to the newly built Four Seasons Hotel at Cumberland Gap, in
Tennessee, where the directors of a new land company and health-resort
scheme had arranged a week of sports and entertainments. About forty
congenial persons from New York and Washington made the trip, the
mountaineers and their families along the route assembling at stations
to see the notabilities among them. The chief attraction, Mrs. Harrison
recorded, seemed to be Ward McAllister, who had been expected, but did
not go. At one station, James Brown Potter, engaged in taking a
constitutional to remove train stiffness, was pointed out by another of
the party to a group of staring natives as the famous arbiter of New
York fashion.

"I want to know!" said a gaunt mountain horseman. "Wal, I've rid fifteen
miles a-purpus to see that dude McAllister, and I don't begrutch it, not
a mite."

All over the land there were yokels and the spouses of yokels and even
the children of yokels, moved by a like interest and curiosity; while
rural visitors to New York, and also New Yorkers born for that
matter--if such a person as a born New Yorker actually existed--craned
their necks from the tops of the Fifth Avenue buses in the hope of
catching a glimpse of the great man, who, for a brief, flitting moment
was an institution of as much importance as the Obelisk or the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But so far as the great world beyond the Weehawken Hills went, Ward
McAllister's was an ephemeral glory. It was a clear case of
anachronism. He was born one hundred years too late, or two hun