of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—­the look of having had something of a social history.”  That “richer, riper look,” that suggestion of a past, is there to-day, and is likely to be there tomorrow.  The particular Sloper house is quite easy of identification.  It is the third from the corner as one goes westward from the Avenue.  In 1835, when Dr. Sloper first took possession, moving uptown from the neighbourhood of the City Hall, which had seen its best days socially, the Square, then the ideal of quiet and genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling.  The edifice in which the Slopers lived and its neighbours were then thought to embody the last results of architectural science.  It actually dates to 1831.  Among the merchants who built in that year were Thomas Suffern, Saul Allen, John Johnston, George Griswold, James Boorman, and William C. Rhinelander.  It was their type of house that was accepted for the neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left of Fifth Avenue.  That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park.  In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings.  Robert Walmsley, of O. Henry’s “The Defeat of the City,” lived there, and the boyhood to which he looked back was one spent on an up-state farm; while another erstwhile tenant in the exclusive row was the devious Artemas Quibble, of Mr. Arthur Train’s narrative, who began life humbly somewhere in grey New England, and ended it, so far as the reader was informed, in Sing Sing Prison.  Then there was the home of Mrs. Martin, the “Duchess of Washington Square” of Brander Matthews’s “The Last Meeting,” and that of Miss Grandish, of Julian Ralph’s “People We Pass,” and the house of Mrs. Delaney, of Edgar Fawcett’s “Rutherford,” and the structure which inspired one-half of Edward W. Townsend’s “Just Across the Square,” and the five-room apartment “at the top of a house with dormer windows on the north side” where Sanford lived according to F. Hopkinson Smith’s “Caleb West,” and where his guests, looking out, could see the “night life of the Park, miniature figures strolling about under the trees, flashing in brilliant light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of many lamps scattered among the budding foliage.”  Also over the Square, regarded in the light of fiction, is the friendly shadow of Bunner, who liked it at any time, but liked it best of all at night, with the great dim branches swaying and breaking in the breeze, the gas lamps flickering and blinking, when the tumults and the shoutings of the day were gone and “only a tramp or something worse in woman’s shape was hurrying across the bleak space, along the winding asphalt, walking over the Potter’s Field of the past on the way to the Potter’s Field to be.”