"I was born in the year 1848, 'the year of trouble,' when most of Europe was in a turmoil" is the first sentence in the first chapter of this book. Being of a noted family—he was the grandson of Alexander Hamilton, the great federalist—it was natural that the author in his younger days should be brought into contact with noted men of the period—with such men, for instance, as Washington Irving and Tom Moore, and later in life with Pierpont Morgan, Max Bierbohm, Abraham Lincoln, Professor Hutchings, the lightning calculator, and Louis Agassiz. It is the fact of his wide personal acquaintance with men of note both in this country and abroad that makes these recollections interesting reading. One could wish that fewer people had been referred to and that more was said about the prominent ones.
As Dr. Hamilton had a busy professional life in a large city,