Van Bibber’s presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising, for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in “Cinderella,” “mixing cocktails at the Knickerbocker Club.”  Only a few doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley apartment that Van Bibber, as related in “Her First Appearance,” took the child that he had practically kidnapped to restore her to her father and to be rewarded for his intrusion by being sensibly called a well-meaning fool.  But there is another apartment house at the south-west corner of the Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street which better fits the description, which tells how Van Bibber, from the windows, could see the many gas lamps of Broadway where it crossed the Avenue a few blocks away, and the bunches of light on Madison Square Garden.

Edgar Fawcett was hardly of the generation of the Flora McFlimseys.  As a matter of fact he was a small boy in knickerbockers when the famous William Allen Butler poem, “Nothing to Wear,” first appeared in the pages of “Harper’s Weekly.”  But Miss McFlimsey was an enduring young lady, who, for many years was accepted as symbolizing the foibles of Madison Square, and she was in a measure in Fawcett’s mind when he wrote, in “A Gentleman of Leisure,” that vigorous description contrasting socially the stretch of the Avenue below Fourteenth Street with the later development a dozen blocks to the north.  In another Fawcett novel, “Olivia Delaplaine,” we find the home of the heroine’s husband in Tenth Street, just off the Avenue; and, reverting to “A Gentleman of Leisure,” Clinton Wainwright, the gentleman in question, lived, like a “visiting Englishman,” at the Brevoort.

There have been many Delmonicos.  But for the purposes of fiction there has never been one just like the establishment that occupied a corner at the junction of the Avenue and Fourteenth Street.  It was a more limited town in those days.  The novelist wishing to depict his hero doing the right thing in the right way by his heroine did not have the variety of choice he has now.  Two squares away, the Academy of Music was, theatrically and operatically, the social centre, so to carry on the narrative with a proper regard for the conventions, the preceding dinner or the following supper was necessarily at the old Delmonico’s.  They were good trenchermen and trencherwomen, those heroes and heroines of yesterday!  Many oyster-beds were depleted, and bins of rare vintage emptied to satisfy the healthy appetites of the inked pages.  Somehow the mouth waters with the memory.  When Delmonico’s moved on to Twenty-sixth Street, and from its terraced tables its patrons could look up at graceful Diana, there were many famous dinners of fiction, such as the one, for example, consumed