AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
in the United States. The subscription price was twenty-five dollars a plate. The ménus were entirely etched and cost three dollars each. Dr. William Pepper, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, appeared the most conspicuously and Frederick D. Stone furnished the motive power. I was chairman of the executive committee. The President of the United States, Grover Cleveland; the Vice-President; the Chief Justice; the Secretaries of War and of the Navy; the General of the Army, Philip H. Sheridan; the English Ambassador, Sir Lyon Playfair; the French Ambassador, the Marquis de Chambrun; the governors of many of the states, with senators, congressmen, men of science and of letters, thoroughly representing the activities of the whole country, took part in the dinner. Mrs. Cleveland, who had been recently married and who was in the pride of her youthful beauty and popularity, held a reception in the corridors where ladies and gentlemen listened to the proceedings, watched the movements and decorations and wished for the terrapin. I wrote little books describing these banquets and both of them were subsequently printed. My connection with these affairs and the correspondence necessarily conducted brought me temporarily into almost intimate association with the Chief Justice and other members of the Supreme Court. Waite was a dark-eyed, good-looking man, well groomed, with much courtesy of manner, but he made no other impression on me.
As it happened, a few months later, for the first time in my life I had three cases in the Supreme Court of the United States and I went down to Washington, having arranged with a friend at our bar to move for my admission. He failed to appear. Seeing General Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts, looking old, stout, weather-beaten, but sturdy, with his twisted eye fastened on a brief, I went over to him and said:
“General, you do not know me, but you did know my
