How much of melancholy lay hidden behind the mask of his humour it would be hard to say. His griefs were tempered by a vein of stoicism. He was a medley of contradictions. Unconventional to the point of eccentricity, his sense of his proper dignity was sound and sufficient. Though lavish in the use of money, he had a full realization of its value and made close contracts for his work. Like Sellers, his mind soared when it sailed financial currents. He lacked acute business judgment in the larger things, while an excellent economist in the lesser. His marriage was the most brilliant stroke of his life. He got the woman of all the world he most needed, a truly lovely and wise helpmate, who kept him in bounds and headed him straight and right while she lived. She was the best of housewives and mothers, and the safest of counsellors and critics. She knew his worth; she appreciated his genius; she understood his limitations and angles. Her death was a grievous disaster as well as a staggering blow. He never wholly recovered from it. IV It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York, where there was already gathered a congenial group to meet and greet him. 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.