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everyone felt sorry for. If possible, her wardrobe was scantier than
mine.
The present generation doesn't know De Wolf Hopper except through their fathers, who remember and envy his recitation of Casey at the Bat.
De Wolf Hopper could have been a great citizen— lawyer, basso profundo— and I'm certain he would have if his father had lived. But his father died of sunstroke when Wolfie was five, and from then on the boy got everything he wanted.
His father John was a son of the great Quaker, Isaac Tatem Hopper, a Philadelphia lawyer who did as much to free the slaves as any man except Abraham Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison.
John eloped with Rosalie De Wolf, daughter of a wealthy Rhode Island retired sea captain. Nowadays their old mansion belongs to the Colts, the firearms family. Neither the De Wolfs nor the Hoppers blessed the marriage of John and Rosalie.
Wolfie, first name William, was born after his parents had been married twelve years. They showered him with that overaffection which results from terror that there would never be a child. He often said to me, "My mother loved me not wisely but too well; I wouldn't have been such a spoiled brat if my father had lived."
In 1858, when Wolfie was born there, the Bowery was the social heart of New York City. Its name came from the great trees lining the streets, which met overhead in a beautiful bower.
The young lawyer Joseph H. Choate, later our Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, stood as Wolfie's godfather. When Mr. Choate had arrived in New York to practice law the John Hoppers had been the first family to welcome him, and the two men became close and devoted friends. It was planned at the christening that when Wolfie was old enough he would be apprenticed to Mr. Choate in law.
After the father's death Rosalie Hopper indulged her boy beyond all reason. I remember his explaining, "I always just took for granted the best of everything. If there was steak for dinner, naturally I would get the tenderloin. When things like that keep up for years
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