Lights and Shadows of New York Life: or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great CityMcCabe, James Dabney
History
Lights and Shadows of New York Life: or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City
McCabe, James Dabney
New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
"Mr. Greeley's back is toward us. He is seated at his desk. His head is
bent over his writing, and his round shoulders are quite prominent. He
is scribbling rapidly. A quire of foolscap, occupying the only clear
space on his desk, is melting rapidly beneath his pen. The desk itself
is a heap of confusion. Here is Mr. Greeley's straw hat; there is his
handkerchief. In front of him is a peck of newspaper clippings, not
neatly rolled up, but loosely sprawled over the desk. At his left a
rickety pair of scissors catches a hurried nap, and at his right a
paste-pot and a half-broken box of wafers appear to have had a
rough-and-tumble fight. An odd-looking paper-holder is just ready to
tumble on the floor. An old-fashioned sand-box, looking like a
dilapidated hour-glass, is half-hidden under a slashed copy of _The New
York World_. Mr. Greeley still sticks to wafers and sand, instead of
using mucilage and blotting-paper. A small drawer, filled with postage
stamps and bright steel pens, has crawled out on the desk. Packages of
folded missives are tucked in the pigeon-holes, winking at us from the
back of the desk, and scores of half-opened letters, mixed with seedy
brown envelopes, flop lazily about the table. Old papers lie gashed and
mangled about his chair, the _debris_ of a literary battle field. A
clean towel hangs on a rack to his right. A bound copy of _The Tribune
Almanac_, from 1838 to 1868, swings from a small chain fastened to a
staple screwed in the side of his desk; two other bound volumes stand on
their feet in front of his nose, and two more of the same kind are fast
asleep on the book-rack in the corner. Stray numbers of the almanac peep
from every nook. The man who would carry off Greeley's bound pile of
almanacs would deserve capital punishment. The Philosopher could better
afford to lose one of his legs than to lose his almanacs. The room is
kept scrupulously clean and neat. A waste paper basket squats between
Mr. Greeley's legs, but one half the torn envelopes and boshy
communications flutter to the floor instead of being tossed into the
basket. The table at his side is covered with a stray copy of _The New
York Ledger_, and a dozen magazines lie thereon. Here is an iron garden
rake wrapped up in an _Independent_. There hangs a pair of handcuffs
once worn by old John Brown, and sent Mr. Greeley by an enthusiastic
admirer of both Horace and John. A champagne basket, filled with old
scrap-books and pamphlets, occupies one corner. A dirty bust of Lincoln,
half hidden in dusty piles of paper, struggles to be seen on the top of
his desk. A pile of election tables, dirty, ragged and torn, clipped
from some unknown newspaper, looks as if they had half a mind to jump
down on the 'Old Man's' bald head. A certificate of life membership in
some tract or abolition society, and maps of the World, New York, and New
Jersey hang on the wall. A rare geological specimen of quartz rock,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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