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.