The next thing I knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had opened The Brunswick.
In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o'clock supper there.

It was thus and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripened into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves behind The Major's buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade.
He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard--very nearly all the celebrities of the day among the outsiders--myself the humble witness and chronicler.

He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived exceedingly well.
The Major's most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had been everywhere.

If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land.

If it was Wall Street he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and a system.