John Hay, quoting old Jack Dade's description of himself, was wont to speak of this group as "of high aspirations and peregrinations." It radiated between Franklin Square, where Joseph W.Harper--"Joe Brooklyn," we called him--reigned in place of his uncle, Fletcher Harper, the man of genius among the original Harper Brothers, and the Lotos Club, then in Irving Place, and Delmonico's, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, with Sutherland's in Liberty Street for a downtown place of luncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon's in Fulton Market.
[Illustration: General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C.S.A .-- Killed in Georgia June 14, 1864--P.E.

Bishop of Louisiana] 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.