re fairly settled in our new home I made the pleasing
discovery that my next door neighbors were our old acquaintances, Mr.
and Mrs. Edmund Pendleton Gaines. Mrs. Gaines was Frances Hogan, a
former neighbor of ours in Houston Street in New York. William Hogan,
her aged father, was living with her, and their close proximity recalled
many early memories. He was a gentleman of broad culture and a
proficient linguist, and at an early age had accompanied his father to
the Cape of Good Hope. He formed an intimacy with Lord Byron at Harrow,
where he received the early portion of his education. Byron was not then
a student but was occupying a small room at Harrow, which he called his
"den." Another of Mr. Hogan's daughters, who is still living, wrote me
that at this time Lord Byron was a young man and her father a little
boy. She says: "Lord Byron often admitted my father to his room, when he
would make him repeat stories of his African life and describe the
occasional appearance of an orang-outang walking through the streets of
Cape Town." After his father's return to New York, Mr. Hogan attended
Columbia College, from which he was graduated in 1811, and afterwards
studied law. He subsequently purchased land in the Black River country
and did much to develop that portion of his native State. The town of
Hogansburg in Franklin County was named after him. He became a county
judge and member of Congress and later resided in Washington, where he
was employed in the Department of State, first as an examiner of claims
and then as an official interpreter.

A short distance from our home and on the same street lived Dr. and Mrs.
Alexander Sharp with their large and interesting family of children, one
of whom, bearing the same name as his father, recently died in
Washington while a Captain in the Navy. Dr. Sharp's wife was a younger
sister of Mrs. U. S. Grant, and her husband was ably filling at the time
the position of U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia. A few doors
from Mrs. Sharp's lived her sister-in-law, the widow of Louis Dent; and
in the same block, but nearer Thirteenth Street, were the residences of
two agreeable Army families, Colonel and Mrs. Almon F. Rockwell and
Colonel and Mrs. Asa Bacon Carey, the latter of whom was the niece of
the late Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont. I formed a pleasant
friendship almost immediately with Mrs. Sharp and was always received
with much cordiality in her home. Corcoran Street, in