In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o’clock supper there. It was thus and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripened into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves behind The Major’s buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade.
He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard—very nearly all the celebrities of the day among the outsiders—myself the humble witness and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived exceedingly well.
The Major’s most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall Street he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had not been an inhabitant.
Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major gave us a most graphic account of how “the old house”—for thus he designated some commercial establishment, which either had no existence or which he had some reason for not more particularly indicating—had sent him in charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after many ups and downs, of how the floods had come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, who was of the party, immediately said, “I can attest the truth of The Major’s story, because my brother Albert and I were in charge of some fishing camps at the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date of the floods, and we caught many of those rosewood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea.”
Augustine’s Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia, and even got as far as New York and Washington, and straightway, The Major declared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look “like a monkey.” He proposed to give a dinner.
There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much at luncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we assembled at The Brunswick. I will dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to say that they were Parisian. After a while in full regalia The Major appeared, a train of servants following with a silver tureen. The lid was lifted.
“Voilà!” says he.
The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked like bean soup flecked by a few strands of black crape!
The explosion duly arrived from the assembled gourmets, I, myself, I am sorry to say, leading the rebellion.
“I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!” exclaimed The Frenchman, quite losing his usual good English in his excitement.