ng at his own home, though urgently invited to it; but
somehow other pressing engagements hindered, and so it was not to be.

On the same day with the Astorian dinner, Mr. Davis, a man of high
social position, had urged me to dine with him, but I could not come as
engaged till the evening. Now he, a local poet himself, had asked me in
divers stanzas of fair rhyme; and so, not willing either to beat him in
versification or to let him beat me, I made this epigrammatic reply in
dog-Latin, which was taken to be rather 'cute:--

"Certes, amice Davis,
Ibo quocunque mavis,
Sed princeps Astor primo
Me rapuit ad prandium;
Cum me relinquit, imo
In me videbis handyum."

This skit was well appreciated. I met at his house divers celebrities,
as indeed I did at many other splendid mansions, especially at the
Mayor's, Mr. Kingsland: I hear he is the third personage in rank in the
United States, and he lives with the grandeur of our London Lord Mayor.
I went with him on the 22d of March 1851 to one of the most magnificent
affairs I ever attended. Here is an extract from my home-letter journal
of same date:--

"Mr. Kingsland, the Mayor, came early to invite me to a grand day, being
the inauguration of the Croton Waterworks. Went off with him at 10 from
the City Hall in a carriage and four followed by forty new omnibuses and
four, some with six horses, and caparisoned with coloured feathers and
little flags, besides a number of private carriages; a gay procession,
nearly a mile long, containing all the legislature and magnates of New
York State and of the city--several hundreds." They visited in turn
divers public institutions, and at most of them I had to speak or to
recite my ballads, especially at a Blind Asylum, where, after an address
from a blind lady (the name was Crosby), "at the request of the Governor
of the State and the Mayor, I answered on the spur of the moment in a
speech and a stave that took the room by storm," &c. &c. And so on for
other institutions, and to the opening of the Croton Aqueduct. But there
is no end to this sort of vainglorious recording. As Willis says in his
_Home Journal_ at the time, "Mr. Tupper is among us, feeling his way
through the wilderness of his laurels, and realising his share of
Emerson's 'banyan' similitude,--the roots that have passed under the sea
and come up on this side of the Atlantic rather smothering him with
their thriftiness in republican soil."