“Certes, amice Davis,
      Ibo quocunque mavis,
    Sed princeps Astor primo
      Me rapuit ad prandium;
    Cum me relinquit, imo
      In me videbis handyum.”

This skit was well appreciated.  I met at his house divers celebrities, as indeed I did at many other splendid mansions, especially at the Mayor’s, Mr. Kingsland:  I hear he is the third personage in rank in the United States, and he lives with the grandeur of our London Lord Mayor.  I went with him on the 22d of March 1851 to one of the most magnificent affairs I ever attended.  Here is an extract from my home-letter journal of same date:—­

“Mr. Kingsland, the Mayor, came early to invite me to a grand day, being the inauguration of the Croton Waterworks.  Went off with him at 10 from the City Hall in a carriage and four followed by forty new omnibuses and four, some with six horses, and caparisoned with coloured feathers and little flags, besides a number of private carriages; a gay procession, nearly a mile long, containing all the legislature and magnates of New York State and of the city—­several hundreds.”  They visited in turn divers public institutions, and at most of them I had to speak or to recite my ballads, especially at a Blind Asylum, where, after an address from a blind lady (the name was Crosby), “at the request of the Governor of the State and the Mayor, I answered on the spur of the moment in a speech and a stave that took the room by storm,” &c. &c.  And so on for other institutions, and to the opening of the Croton Aqueduct.  But there is no end to this sort of vainglorious recording.  As Willis says in his Home Journal at the time, “Mr. Tupper is among us, feeling his way through the wilderness of his laurels, and realising his share of Emerson’s ‘banyan’ similitude,—­the roots that have passed under the sea and come up on this side of the Atlantic rather smothering him with their thriftiness in republican soil.”  I suppose by thriftiness he meant thrivingness.

My first acquaintance with N.P.  Willis arose in this, way.  He had (as I have mentioned before) been in the habit of quoting month after month in his own paper passages from my “Proverbial Philosophy,” believing that book to be an obscure survival of the Shakespearean era, and that its author had been dead some three centuries.  When he came to town, I called upon him at his lodging near Golden Square, walking in plainly “sans tambour et trompette” but simply announcing the then young-looking author as his old Proverbialist!  I never saw a man look so astonished in my life; he turned pale, and vowed that he wouldn’t believe that this youth could be his long-departed prophet; however, I soon convinced him that I was myself, and carried him off to dine in Burlington Street.  Afterwards we improved into a friendship till he went the way of all flesh in Heaven’s good time.