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.