On my return to America, I entered the law office of Chauncey Shaffer, who was a leader of the New York Bar and had a nation-wide reputation. He had been retained in many important cases, and some romantic. His offices were first on the third floor in an old-fashioned private house at No. 7 Murray Street, and later, he moved into the Bennett Building, one of the city’s first modern office buildings.
In our new, well-lighted quarters, we had some interesting neighbours, and these, along with many another, were constantly dropping in on Shaffer. I still recall with pleasure my acquaintance in those surroundings with Gildersleeve and Purroy, with Butzel and Bourke Cochran.
Henry A. Gildersleeve had been born on a farm in Dutchess County, and in early life was the handiest man with his fists in all that district. In the Civil War he organized a company and was elected a captain. He returned from that to complete his education and become a lawyer, but he became a crack shot, too, at the international rifle matches; and when he first visited Shaffer’s office, it was as an Apollo of a man with romance in every feature of his face and every particle of attire.
He was offered by both parties the nomination as Judge of General Sessions and came to consult Shaffer about it. I was in the room at the time.
The scene is still vivid. Shaffer never forgot his Napoleonic pose when there was anybody present to observe it, and now he moved about with one hand under his coat tails and the other thrust into his breast. The harder he thought, the harder he chewed his tobacco and the more frequent were his expectorations. Finally he stopped short in front of Gildersleeve, who had been waiting patiently for this queer oracle to speak.
“If you have to go down in this fight,” Shaffer said, “go down in good company: take the Fusion nomination.”
Gildersleeve accepted that advice. He remained on the bench until he was seventy years of age. He is in his eighties now and as keen of intellect as in those far-off days when he used to visit Shaffer. He is still one of my favourite golf companions.
On many Saturdays we did little work; the coterie met in Shaffer’s office, and we talked; it would be nearer to the mark to say that one of us talked and entertained the others by his endless flow of good stories and sparkling reminiscences. He was a student under Shaffer, and his name was Bourke Cochran. I never saw him poring over Blackstone or Kent, but on Saturday when freed from his duties as principal of the Public School at Tuckahoe, this exuberant young instructor would either practise his future orations on us or pour out his flood of Cochranisms and anecdotes. Not getting my name at the first meeting, he dubbed me “Mortgagee” and still calls me so. He thrilled us with the account of his early struggles at Dublin University, roused our enthusiasm by his plans to restore oratory to the New York Bar, and evoked our applause by his determination to Patrick Henryize the Assembly at Albany. The Democrats promised him a nomination to the Assembly, but withdrew the promise when they discovered that he was not yet twenty-one.
It was while at Shaffer’s that I began to find out how human great men really are. The names of Benjamin F. Butler—the redoubtable Butler of Massachusetts—and Preston Plumb of Kansas used to move me to awe. One of my employer’s important cases involved some grants of land to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad and was brought by John Leisenring, of Pennsylvania, whose attorney-of-record, Congressman-at-large Charles P. Albright, of the same state, had, in addition to Shaffer, associated with him in the affair, Butler and Plumb. The latter used to dash into our office without a necktie and then chafe at the former’s unpunctuality and indifference in the matter of keeping appointments.
“It’s all very well for Butler to behave like this just now,” he would say. “Wait a few more years. Then he will still be a mere Congressman, while I’ll be a United States Senator! We’ll see who’ll kowtow to the other then!”