ARRIVAL OF THE SCOTCH AUTHORS AT McCLURE’S LITERARY COLONY. Yesterday morning, at a very early hour, I was awakened by an imperative summons from one of the trusty sleuths that patrol the river-front in the interest of the paper on which I am employed and informed that a band of celebrated literary men had just been landed from a tramp steamer at a Hoboken pier. The reticence of actors, singers, authors, practical evangelists, and female temperance agitators concerning their movements renders it necessary for a great daily paper to maintain a corps of reliable spies, whose duty it is to meet every incoming steamer and see that neither Henry Irving nor Steve Brodie nor Lady Henry Somerset lands unobserved and unchronicled on our hospitable shores. The human ferret who aroused me from my slumbers declared that the newly arrived authors were met at the pier by an active, enthusiastic little man, who instantly departed with them in the direction of the setting sun. “And what makes you think that they were literary men?” I inquired. “Are they entered on the ship’s papers as able-bodied authors?” “Naw,” rejoined the sleuth. “They’re beatin’ the contract labor law. I knew they was authors the minute I seen the little man that met them at the dock. He’s a regular author’s padrone. He’s got a hull town full of ’em back in Jersey some place. I’ve known him this five year or more.” I waited to hear no more, for I knew that the active little man could be none other than McClure; and so I started without a moment’s delay for the village of Syndicate on the banks of the fragrant Hackensack. On my way to the station for the authors’ settlement I met a small boy hurrying along the dusty highway. I recognized him as the son of an author who is now acting as timekeeper of the Grant memoir gang, and stopped him to inquire about Mr. McClure. “That’s him a-coming there now, I think,” replied the urchin.