phers I have not been on a race
course or seen a horse race or played for other than immaterial stakes
for more than thirty years.

IV

As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter many sorts of people,
high and low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way;
statesmen and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize
fighters; the riffraff and the elite; the professional and dilettante of
the world polite and the underworld.

I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew John Morrissey. I have seen
Heenan--one of the handsomest men of his time--and likewise Adah Isaacs
Menken, his inamorata--many said his wife--who went into mourning
for him and thereafter hied away to Paris, where she lived under
the protection of Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried her in Pere
Lachaise under a handsome monument bearing two words, "Thou knowest,"
beneath a carved hand pointed to heaven.

I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley.

The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebrity
when I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and on
all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest;
her entourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was
undeniable. She reigned for a long time the recognized queen of the
demi-monde. I have beheld her in her glory on her throne--her two
thrones, for she had two--one on the south side of the river, the other
at the east end--not to mention the race course--surrounded by a retinue
of the disreputable. She did not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I
declined many opportunities to meet her.

Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an aristocratic, even a
distinguished, North Carolina family. He came to New York and set up for
a swell. How he lived I never cared to find out, though he was believed
to be what the police call a "fence." He seemed a cross between a "con"
and a "beat." Yet for a while he flourished at Delmonico's, which he
made his headquarters, and cut a kind of dash with the unknowing. He was
a handsome, mannerly brute who knew how to dress and carry himself like
a gentleman.

Later there came to New York another Southerner--a Far Southerner of a
very different quality--who attracted no little attention. This was
Tom Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of
Texas; he, himself, a wit, _bon homme_ and raconteur. Travers once said: