Society as I Have Found It

SOCIETY AS I HAVE FOUND IT.
BY WARD McALLISTER NEW YORK CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY 104 & 106 Fourth Avenue, New York Copyright, 1890, By WARD McALLISTER. All rights reserved. THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, RAHWAY, N. J.
“This book is intended to be miscellaneous, with a noble disdain of regularity.”— Obiter Dicta.
“How then does a man, be he good or bad, big or little, make his Memoirs interesting? To say that the one thing needful is individuality, is not quite enough. To have an individuality is no sort of distinction, but to be able to make it felt in writing is not only distinction, but under favorable circumstances, immortality.”— The Same.
One who reads this book through will have as rough a mental journey as his physical nature would undergo in riding over a corduroy road in an old stage-coach. It makes no pretension to either scholarship or elegant diction.
W. McA.



My Family—My Mother an Angel of Beauty and Charity—My Father’s Nobleness of Character—Building Bonfires on Paradise Rocks and Flying Kites from Purgatory with Uncle Sam Ward—My Brother the Soldier—My Brother the Lawyer.
In 1820 my mother, a beautiful girl of eighteen years, was introduced into New York society by her sister, Mrs. Samuel Ward, the wife of Samuel Ward, the banker, of the firm of Prime, Ward & King. She was a great belle in the days when Robert and Richard Ray and Prescott Hall were of the jeunesse dorée of this city. In my opinion, she was the most beautiful, Murillo-like woman I have ever seen, and she was as good as she was beautiful;—an angel in works of charity and sympathy for her race. Charlotte Corday’s picture in the Louvre is a picture of my mother. The likeness arose from the fact that her family were descended on the maternal side from the Corday family of France. This also accounts for all my family being, from time immemorial, good Democrats. No one was too humble to be received and cared for and sympathized with by my mother. Her pastime was by the bedside of hospital patients, and in the schoolroom of her children. She followed the precepts of her mother’s great-grandfather, the Rev. Gabriel Marion (grandfather of Gen. Francis Marion) as expressed in his will to the following effect: “As to the poor, I have always treated them as my brethren. My dear family will, I know, follow my example.” It also contained this item: “I give her, my wife, my new carriage and horses, that she may visit her friends in comfort.” This ancestor came from Rochelle in a large ship chartered for the Carolinas by several wealthy Huguenot families. The Hugers and Trapiers and others came over in the same ship. He did not leave France empty-handed, for on his arrival in Carolina he bought a plantation on Goose Creek, near Charleston, where he was buried.