t while in New York I saw a great deal of Bayard
Taylor and his wife. I had known him since 1850 and was intimate with
him till his death. He occupied the same house with the distinguished
poet R. H. Stoddard. I experienced from both much kindness. We had
amusing Saturday evenings there, where droll plays were improvised, and
admirable disguises made out of anything. In after years, in London,
Walter H. Pollock, Minto (recently deceased), and myself, did the same.
One night, in the latter circle, we played _Hamlet_, but the chief
character was the Sentinel, who stared at the Ghost with such open-jawed
horror--"_bouche beante_, _rechignez_!"--and so prominently, that poor
Hamlet was under a cloud. Pollock's great capuchon overcoat served for
all kinds of mysterious characters. We were also kindly entertained many
a time and oft in New York by Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Dana.

My engagement expired on the _Times_--where, by the way, I was paid in
full in good money--and I found myself without employment in a fearful
financial panic. During the spring and early summer we had lived at the
Gramercy Park Hotel; we now went to a very pleasant boarding-house kept
by Mrs. Dunn, on Staten Island. My old friend, George Ward, and G. W.
Curtis, well known in literature and politics (who had been at Mr.
Greene's school), lived at no great distance from us. The steamboats
from New York to Staten Island got to racing, and I enjoyed it very much,
but George Ward and some of the milder sort protested against it, and it
was stopped; which I thought rather hard, for we had very little
amusement in those dismal days. I was once in a steamboat race when our
boat knocked away the paddle-box from the other and smashed the wheel.
From the days of the Romans and Norsemen down to the present time, there
was never any form of amusement discovered so daring, so dangerous, and
so exciting as a steamboat race, and nobody but Americans could have ever
invented or indulged in it.

The old _Knickerbocker Magazine_ had been for a long time running down to
absolutely nothing. A Mr. Gilmore purchased it, and endeavoured to
galvanise it into life. Its sober grey-blue cover was changed to orange.
Mr. Clark left it, to my sorrow; but there was no help for it, for there
was not a penny to pay him. I consented to edit it for half ownership,
for I had an idea. This was, to make it promptly a strong Republican
monthly for the time, which was utterly o