[Illustration:  “AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF FIFTY-FOURTH STREET IS THE UNIVERSITY CLUB, TO THE MIND OF ARNOLD BENNETT (’YOUR UNITED STATES’), THE FINEST OF ALL THE FINE STRUCTURES THAT LINE THE AVENUE”]

But to turn into the Avenue proper, and to follow the trail of the novelists northward.  At the very point of departure we are on the site of the imaginary structure that gave the title to Leroy Scott’s “No. 13 Washington Square,” for the reason that there is no such number at all, and that the house in question must have occupied the space between Nos. 12 and 14, respectively, on the east and west corners facing Waverly Place.  Before the next street is reached we have passed the home of the Huntingdons of Edgar Fawcett’s “A Hopeless Case,” and at the southwest corner of the Avenue and Eighth Street, facing the Brevoort, is No. 68 Clinton Place, which was not only the setting, but also the raison d’etre of Thomas A. Janvier’s “A Temporary Deadlock.”  Almost diagonally across the street is an old brick house, with Ionic pillars of marble and a fanlight at the arched entrance—­one of those houses that, to use the novelist’s words, “preserve unobtrusively, in the midst of a city that is being constantly rebuilt, the pure beauty of Colonial dwellings.”  It was the home of the Ferrols of Stephen French Whitman’s “Predestined,” one of the books of real power that appear from time to time, to be strangely neglected, and through that neglect to tempt the discriminating reader to contempt for the literary judgment of his age.

At the northwest corner of Ninth Street there is a brownish-green building erected in the long, long ago to serve as a domicile of the Brevoort family, which had once exercised pastoral sway over so many acres of this region.  Later it became the home of the De Rhams.  But to Richard Harding Davis, then a reporter on the “Evening Sun,” it had nothing of the flavour of the Patroons.  It was simply the house where young Cortlandt Van Bibber, returning from Jersey City where he had witnessed the “go” between “Dutchy” Mack and a coloured person professionally known as the Black Diamond, found his burglar.  There is no mistaking the house, which “faced the avenue,” nor the stone wall that ran back to the brown stable which opened on the side street, nor the door in the wall, that, opening cautiously, showed Van Bibber the head of his quarry.  “The house was tightly closed, as if some one was lying inside dead,” was a line of Mr. Davis’s description.  Many years after the writing of “Van Bibber’s Burglar,” another maker of fiction associated with New York was standing before the Ninth Street house, of the history of which he knew nothing.  “Grim tragedy lives there, or should live there,” said Owen Johnson, “I never pass here without the feeling that there is some one lying dead inside.”