I was told that the Senate Game had been played during the War of Sections and directly after for large sums. With the arrival of the rebel brigadiers it was perforce reduced to a reasonable limit.
The "road gang" was not unknown at the White House. Sometimes it assembled at private houses, but its accustomed place of meeting was first Welcker's and then Chamberlin's. I do not know whether it continues to have abiding place or even an existence. In spite of the reputation given me by the pert paragraphers I have not been on a race course or seen a horse race or played for other than immaterial stakes for more than thirty years.
As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter many sorts of people, high and low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way; statesmen and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize fighters; the riffraff and the élite; the professional and dilettante of the world polite and the underworld.
I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew John Morrissey. I have seen Heenan--one of the handsomest men of his time--and likewise Adah Isaacs Menken, his inamorata--many said his wife--who went into mourning for him and thereafter hied away to Paris, where she lived under the protection of Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried her in Père Lachaise under a handsome monument bearing two words, "Thou knowest," beneath a carved hand pointed to heaven.
I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley.
The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebrity when I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and on all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest; her entourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable. She reigned for a long time the recognized queen of the demi-monde. I have beheld her in her glory on her throne--her two thrones, for she had two--one on the south side of the river, the other at the east end--not to mention the race course--surrounded by a retinue of the disreputable. She did not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I declined many opportunities to meet her.
Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an aristocratic, even a distinguished, North Carolina family. He came to New York and set up for a swell. How he lived I never cared to find out, though he was believed to be what the police call a "fence." He seemed a cross between a "con" and a "beat." Yet for a while he flourished at Delmonico's, which he made his headquarters, and cut a kind of dash with the unknowing. He was a handsome, mannerly brute who knew how to dress and carry himself like a gentleman.