Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

itself a partly worthy successor of the famous crowd at
Pfaff's. Its terrain extended as far north as Thirty-fourth
Street and southward to the fateful corer mansion
wherein Madame Ronalds had once startled New York
society with her tiara of gas-jets, fed with hydrogen from
a concealed tank beyond the proper field for investigation.
This yellowed little note serves to recall the personnel of
the neo-Pfaffians:
DEAR MITCHELL: I came home today. Come around about
9 P. M. and play-well, the old game. LOGAN.
New York, August 29, 1878.
There were two Southerners in the Madison Square
group of friends, both loyal alumni of Mr. Jefferson's
university at Charlottesville, and both long since dead:
John L. Logan, a nephew of the statesman orator John
Randolph Tucker and a law pupil of Judge Roger A.
Pryor, fiery journalist, Confederate brigadier, duellist,
and tall jurist, who used to flash his wit upon us now and
then; and Virginius Dabney, sweet-souled gentleman and
scholar, who adored the comet and with the help of the
big bassoon of his banker-friend, Joseph Wilhelm Drexel,
used to disturb the atmosphere around Madison Avenue
and Twenty-ninth Street with sonorous melody. Dabney
published a novel called "Don Miff: A Symphony of
Life," which does not deserve to be forgotten. Henri
Murger would have been charmed with it. The Sternelike chapters of the narrative of love were accompanied
by musical scores illustrating the text and constituting
the symphony. There was Tom Calvert, an Englishman

of fastidious literary taste in the school of Walter Pater;
he was afterward for many years the editor of the Portland Argus. There was Wales, powerful and promising as
a cartoonist while he lived; his pictures signed "J. A. W."