If you know your Avenue well enough, the countenances of nearly all of the “Best-Selling” kings are easy of recognition.  Arriving at the Thirties, Robert W. Chambers is likely to turn off, bound for one of the antique shops that are to be found in the parallel thoroughfare two blocks to the east.  At any point on the Avenue between the Washington Arch and the Plaza you may stumble upon the cane-swinging discoverer of the principality of Graustark, and the cane-swinging inventor of the “Tennessee Shad,” appraising together the new styles in women’s hats, or investigating the display in a shop-window.  What is the subject that they are so earnestly discussing?  The Influence of Rabelais on the Monastic System of the Fifteenth Century?  The obscurity of Robert Browning?  Whether or not the art of the novel is a finer art than it was in the days of the Victorians?  Not at all.  The point in dispute is the figure of Delehanty’s batting average in 1867.  The vital importance of the matter is the reason of their obvious excitement.

Of more serious aspect is Mr. James Lane Allen, whose tales of the Kentucky Blue Grass Region I hope will be read as they deserve for many generations to come.  Rex Beach swings along musing perhaps on the solitudes of Lake Hopatcong.  Rupert Hughes studies the faces in the Avenue throng with the hope of finding the inspiration for a title for the projected novel that will be more eccentric, if possible, than the title of the last.  Jesse Lynch Williams and Arthur Train seek rest after their perambulatory efforts in the luxurious seclusion of the University Club at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street—­the “Morgue” of the flippant—­where, from the windows, the former first saw My Lost Duchess, and the latter discovered the possibilities of McAllister.  A few years ago in one of the business buildings that had broken into the residential stretch below Fourteenth Street, was the office that F. Marion Crawford always maintained for use during the occasional visits he made to New York.  The tall figure of the author of the Saracinesca novels was a familiar sight on the Avenue of the late nineties and the first years of the present century.  But his stays were brief.  The call of the vineyard-covered mountains about Sorrento was too strong.

From time to time the Avenue has seen literary visitors whose appearance could not be regarded as a temporary home coming.  Twenty years have passed since Rudyard Kipling paid us his last visit, and it was a very different Fifth Avenue from the street of today that he knew.  But even then it was a part of the town that moved him to dreams of “heavenly loot.”  There was, until a year or two ago at least, in an office at Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, an old cane-bottomed chair.  Once it had been in a room on the seventh story of a building at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street, and there it had been known as the Barrie Chair, for in it the creator of Thrums had been wont to curl himself up, and from its comfortable