experience and great social distinction. He had studied long in Paris
and was the pal of John Howard Payne, the familiar friend of Lamartine,
Dumas and Lemaitre. He knew Beranger, Hugo and Balzac. It would be hard
to find three Kentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant
and worldly wise than he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray.

Indeed the list of my acquaintances--many of them intimates--some of
them friends--would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the
foreigners, embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles
to Grover Cleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John
Chamberlin to Thomas Edison. I once served as honorary pall-bearer to a
professional gambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had been
a gallant Confederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist, and
circumstance diverted into a sport; but who retained to the last the
poetic fancy and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him, when he
died, like a veritable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends. He was not
a bad sort in business, as the English say, nor in conviviality. But in
fighting he was "a dandy." The goody-goody philosophy of the namby-pamby
takes an extreme and unreal view of life. It flies to extremes. There
are middle men. Travers used to describe one of these, whom he did not
wish particularly to emphasize, as "a fairly clever son-of-a-gun."

Chapter the Twenty-Ninth

About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His
Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of
1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example

I

I have had a liberal education in party convocations, State and
national. In those of 1860 I served as an all-around newspaper reporter.
A member of each National Democratic Convention from 1876 to 1892,
presiding over the first, and in those of 1880 and 1888 chosen chairman
of the Resolutions Committee, I wrote many of the platforms and had a
decisive voice in all of them.

In 1880 I had stood for the renomination of "the Old Ticket," that is,
Tilden and Hendricks, making the eight-to-seven action of the Electoral
Tribunal of 1877 in favor of Hayes and Wheeler the paramount issue. It
seems strange now that any one should have contested this. Yet it was
stoutly contested. Mr. Tilden settled all dispute by sending a letter to
the convention declining to be a candidate. In