[Illustration:  OLDEST BUILDING ON THE SQUARE.  On this moment of writing it is still standing on the south of Washington Square.]

Edgar Allan Poe lived with his sick young wife Virginia, on Carmine Street, and lived very uncomfortably, too.  The name of his boarding-house keeper is lost to posterity, but the poet wrote of her food:  “I wish Kate our cat could see it.  She would faint.”

Poor Poe lived always somewhere near the Square.  Once in a while he moved away for a time, but he invariably gravitated back to it and to his old friends there.  It was in Carmine Street that he wrote his “Arthur Gordon Pym,” with Gowans the publisher for a fellow lodger; it was on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place that he created “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  After Virginia’s death, he took a room just off the Square, and wrote the “Imp of the Perverse,” with her picture (it is said) above his desk.  It was at these quarters that Lowell called on him, and found him, alas! “not himself that day.”  The old Square has no stranger nor sadder shade to haunt it than that of the brilliant and melancholy genius who in life loved it so well.

Poe’s friend Willis published many of his stories and articles in the Sun, still a newcomer in the old field of journalism.  Willis has his own connection with the tale of the Square, though not a very glorious one.  The town buzzed for days with talk of the sensational interview between Nym Crinkle and Edwin Forrest, the actor.  Mr. Willis made some comments on Forrest’s divorce, in an editorial, and that player, so well adored by the American public, took him by the coat collar in Washington Square and exercised his stage-trained muscles by giving him a thorough and spectacular thrashing.

Somewhere in that neighbourhood, much earlier, another editor, William Coleman, founder of the Evening Post, and Jeremiah Thompson, Collector of the Port, fought a duel to the death.  It was indeed to the death, for Thompson was wounded fatally.  But duels were common enough in those days; we feel still the thrill of indignation roused by the shooting of Alexander Hamilton by Burr.

The old University of New York—­where Professor Morse conducted his great experiments in telegraphy, where Samuel Colt in his tower workroom perfected his revolver, where the Historical Society of New York was first established and where many of our most distinguished citizens received their education—­was never a financial success.  For a time they tried to make it pay by taking tenants—­young students, and bachelors who wished seclusion for writing or research.  Then, in the course of time, it was moved away to the banks of the Hudson.  On the site now stands a modern structure, where, to be sure, a few of the old University departments are still conducted, but which is chiefly celebrated as being the first all-bachelor apartment house erected in town.  It is appropriately called the “Benedick,” after a certain young man who scoffed at matrimony,—­and incidentally got married!