[Illustration:  GROVE STREET.  Looking toward St. Luke’s Church.]

They secretly agreed to go to the masked ball at the Brevoorts’ as their romantic favourites and prototypes.  The detailed descriptions in the book gave them sufficient inspiration.  She wore floating gauzes, bracelets, “a small coronet of jewels” and “a rose-coloured, bridal veil.”  His dress was “simple, yet not without marks of costliness,” with a “high Tartarian cap....  Here and there, too, over his vest, which was confined by a flowered girdle of Kaskan, hung strings of fine pearls, disposed with an air of studied negligence.”

So they met at the ball and danced together, and I suppose he quoted: 

"Fly to the desert, fly with me, Our Arab tents are rude for thee; But, oh! the choice what heart can doubt, Of tents with love, or thrones without?"

Obviously she chose the tents with love, for as the clock struck four they slipped away together and were married!

As Lossing puts it: 

     “They left the festive scene together at four o’clock in the
     morning, and were married before breakfast.”

They did not change their costumes, dear things!  They wanted the romantic trappings for their love poem—­a love poem which was to them more enchanting—­more miraculous—­than that of Lalla Rookh and the King of Bucharia.  I hope they lived happily ever after, like the brave, young romanticists they were!

In 1835 a hotel was opened on the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, and it was appropriately named for the illustrious family over the way.  The Brevoort House is certainly as historic a pile, socially speaking, as lower New York has to offer.  Arthur Bartlett Maurice says of it: 

     “In the old-time novels of New York life visiting Englishmen
     invariably stopped at the Brevoort.”

Of this hotel more anon, since it has recently become knit into the fabric of the modern Village.

But a scant two blocks away from the Brevoort stands another hostelry which is indissolubly a part of New York’s growth—­especially the growth of her Artist’s Colony.  It is the Lafayette, or as many of its habitues still love to call it—­“The Old Martin.”  This, the first and most famous French restaurant of New York, needs a special word or two.  It must be considered alone, and not in the company of lesser and more modern eating places.

John Reed says that the “Old Martin” was the real link between the old Village and the new, since it was the cradle of artistic life in New York.  Bohemians, he declared, first foregathered there as Bohemians, and the beginnings of what has become America’s Latin Quarter and Soho there first saw the light of day—­or rather the lights of midnight.