He would tell me stories by the hour and send me to buy him lottery tickets.

I afterward learned that that form of gambling was his mania.

I also learned that many of his stories were apocryphal or very highly colored.
One of these stories especially took me.

It related how when he was on a yachting cruise in the Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by pirates, and how he being the likeliest of the company was tied up and whipped to make him disgorge, or tell where the treasure was.
"Colonel Walton," said I, "did the whipping hurt you much ?" "Sir," he replied, as if I were a grown-up, "they whipped me until I was perfectly disgusted." An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mention Colonel Walton--a most distinguished, religious old lady--and said to me, "Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain or confess that you ever knew him," proceeding to give me his awful, blood-curdling history.
It was mainly a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then living--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then three score and ten--and he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord! Don't they ever die!" Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and with many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse of hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have acquired for official station.

Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it is a veritable eye opener.