how they managed it, by what charm and persuasion they gathered with such regularity so many of the literati really worth while.  But it was a smaller town then.  It was easier to be neighbourly.  When Thackeray, on the evening of New Year’s Day, 1853, journeyed in a sleigh from his hotel to a reception held in a house on the west side of Fifth Avenue between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Streets, the destination was characterized as a villa in the country.

To revert to the note with which this chapter began.  Were it possible for us to be transported back to the London of the fifties the sight of a Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been necessary to stir our pulses.  It would have been an event to have seen in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R.  James, or Samuel Warren, of “Ten Thousand a Year,” or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits.  So why disdain, merely because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on the Fifth Avenue of today?  I remember my first literary walk down the Avenue.  It was in the company of Mr. Edward W. Townsend.  I was very young, and he was the creator of Chimmie Fadden, and the author of “A Daughter of the Tenements,” and I wished that all the world might see.  Then the time came when the sight of literary faces was less of a novelty, when it was not unusual to meet the author of “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” who had left his home on Fifty-ninth Street, facing the Park, for an afternoon stroll, and to receive his nod of kindly recognition; or to pass Edmund Clarence Stedman, to whom I owed, as so many others have owed, the first words of encouragement, or to see Frank R. Stockton, or Mr. Gilder and Mr. Johnson of the “Century,” or Brander Matthews on his way to the club in West Forty-third Street.

Looking down upon the Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-third Street, just below the Waldorf, are familiar windows.  They belonged to a hotel that was, or is, the Cambridge, and in the rooms behind the windows, I recall occasional pleasant and profitable hours spent in the company of Richard Harding Davis.  There was another window some blocks farther down, in the building occupying the point where Fifth Avenue and Broadway join.  That window gave light to the workshop of James L. Ford, the obstinate satirist, who resents the charge of amiability, and who will not be pleased if you tell him that in the pages of “The Literary Shop” he did the best work of his life.  At another corner, between the two already mentioned, the early riser of a few years ago might have seen the literary pride of Indiana assuming the duties of the traffic policeman who had not yet reached his post, and with the aid of a whistle joyously acquired ordering east and west-bound vehicles to proceed and north and south-bound vehicles to halt.