As I happened to know several people who passed, it
was droll enough to hear this great master of character give them their
dues. Mr. Choate moved along in his regal, affluent manner. The large
style of the man, so magnificent and yet so modest, at once arrested
Thackeray's attention, and he forbore to place him in his extemporaneous
catalogue. I remember a pallid, sharp-faced girl fluttering past, and
how Thackeray exulted in the history of this "frail little bit of
porcelain," as he called her. There was something in her manner that
made him hate her, and he insisted she had murdered somebody on her way
to the hall. Altogether this marvellous prelude to the concert made a
deep impression on Thackeray's one listener, into whose ear he whispered
his fatal insinuations. There is one man still living and moving about
the streets I walk in occasionally, whom I never encounter without
almost a shudder, remembering as I do the unerring shaft which Thackeray
sent that night into the unknown man's character.
One day, many years ago, I saw him chaffing on the sidewalk in London,
in front of the Athenaeum Club, with a monstrous-sized, "copiously
ebriose" cabman, and I judged from the driver's ludicrously careful way
of landing the coin deep down in his breeches-pocket, that Thackeray had
given him a very unusual fare.
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