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. IV 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. Later there came to New York another Southerner--a Far Southerner of a very different quality--who attracted no little attention. This was Tom Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of Texas; he, himself, a wit, _bon homme_ and raconteur. Travers once said: "We have three professional liars in America--Tom Ochiltree is one and George Alfred Townsend is the other two."