Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester and I--very much younger
men--sat at their feet and immensely enjoyed their brilliant conversation.
Dr. Yandell was not only as proclaimed by Dr. Gross and Dr. Sayre the
ablest surgeon of his day, but he was also a gentleman of varied experience
and great social distinction. He had studied long in Paris and was the pal
of John Howard Payne, the familiar friend of Lamartine, Dumas and Lemaitre.
He knew Beranger, Hugo and Balzac. It would be hard to find three
Kentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant and worldly wise
than he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray.
Indeed the list of my acquaintances--many of them intimates--some of them
friends--would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the foreigners,
embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles to Grover
Cleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John Chamberlin
to Thomas Edison. I once served as honorary pall-bearer to a professional
gambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had been a gallant
Confederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist, and circumstance
diverted into a sport; but who retained to the last the poetic fancy
and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him, when he died, like a
veritable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends. He was not a bad sort in
business, as the English say, nor in conviviality. But in fighting he was
"a dandy." The goody-goody philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extreme
and unreal view of life.
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