by the otherwise faultless Walters, for a brief period in the service of Mr. Van Bibber—­the menu selected:  “Little Neck clams first, with chablis, and pea-soup, and caviare on toast, before the oyster crabs, with Johannisberger Cabinet; then an entree of calves’ brains and rice; then no roast, but a bird, cold asparagus with French dressing, Camembert cheese, and Turkish coffee,” may be accepted as indicating the gastronomical taste of the author in the days when youth meant good digestion—­but with the departure from the old Fourteenth Street corner something of the flavour of the name passed forever.

If New York has never had another restaurant that meant to the novelist just what the traditional Delmonico’s meant, there has also never been another hotel like the old Fifth Avenue.  In actual life the so-called “Ladies’ Parlour” on the second floor, reached, if I remember rightly, by means of an entrance on the Twenty-third Street side, was dreary enough; but turn to the pages of the romance of the sixties and seventies and eighties, and on the heavily upholstered sofas enamoured couples sat in furtive meeting, and words of endearment were whispered, and all the stock intrigue of fiction was set in motion.  Then, on the ground floor, was the Amen Corner, without which no tale of political life was complete, and the various rooms for more formal gatherings, such as the one in which took place “The Great Secretary of State Interview,” as narrated by Jesse Lynch Williams many years ago.

But for the full flavour of the romance of this section of Fifth Avenue it is not necessary to go back to the leisurely novelists of the eighties and before.  Recall the work of a man who, a short ten years ago, was turning out from week to week the mirth-provoking, amazement-provoking tales dealing with the life of what he termed his “Little Old Bagdad on-the-Subway,” his “Noisyville on-the-Hudson,” his “City of Chameleon Changes.”  For the Avenue as the expression of the city’s wealth and magnificence and aristocracy the late O. Henry had little love.  The glitter and pomp and pageantry were not for “the likes of him.”  He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering “El” road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of “George the Veracious,” running between the silent and terrible mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor.