The Harper contingent, beside its chief, embraced Tom Nast and William A. Seaver, whom John Russell Young named “Papa Pendennis,” and pictured as “a man of letters among men of the world and a man of the world among men of letters,” a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor Johnson, and Major Constable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and not a bookman, yet had known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the family of Edinburgh publishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from California. Whitelaw Reid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was beginning to make himself felt in journalism. John Hay played high priest to the revels. Occasionally I made a pious pilgrimage to the delightful shrine.
Truth to tell, it emulated rather the gods than the graces, though all of us had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late at night; and Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield and Murat Halstead from Cincinnati to join us. Howells, always something of a prig, living in Boston, held himself at too high account; but often we had Joseph Jefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a while Edwin Booth, who could not quite trust himself to go our gait. The fine fellows we caught from oversea were innumerable, from the elder Sothern and Sala and Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton. Times went very well those days, and whilst some looked on askance, notably Curtis and, rather oddly, Stedman, and thought we were wasting time and convivializing more than was good for us, we were mostly young and hearty, ranging from thirty to five and forty years of age, with amazing capabilities both for work and play, and I cannot recall that any hurt to any of us came of it.
Although robustious, our fribbles were harmless enough—ebullitions of animal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety unguarded—though each shade, treading the Celestian way, as most of them do, and recurring to those Noctes Ambrosianæ, might e’en repeat to the other the words on a memorable occasion addressed by Curran to Lord Avonmore:
“We spent them not in toys or lust or wine;
But search of deep philosophy,
Wit, eloquence and poesy—
Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.”
V
Mark Twain was the life of every company and all occasions. I remember a practical joke of his suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party of us were supping after the theater at the old Brevoort House. A card was brought to me from a reporter of the World. I was about to deny myself, when Mark Twain said:
“Give it to me, I’ll fix it,” and left the table.
Presently he came to the door and beckoned me out.
“I represented myself as your secretary and told this man,” said he, “that you were not here, but that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as well I would fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb and doesn’t know either of you. I am going to introduce you as Halstead and we’ll have some fun.”
No sooner said than done. The reporter proved to be a little bald-headed cherub newly arrived from the isle of dreams, and I lined out to him a column or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in every opinion. I declared him in favor of paying the national debt in greenbacks. Touching the sectional question, which was then the burning issue of the time, I made the mock Halstead say: “The ‘bloody shirt’ is only a kind of Pickwickian battle cry. It is convenient during political campaigns and on election day. Perhaps you do not know that I am myself of dyed-in-the-wool Southern and secession stock. My father and grandfather came to Ohio from South Carolina just before I was born. Naturally I have no sectional prejudices, but I live in Cincinnati and I am a Republican.”