d seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and
frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who
had strutted their brief hour and passed away. It was the nightly
gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such
wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wallacks, Harry
Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitchell, Brown, and Junius Brutus
Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and
the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one
side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk.

In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after
night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai
M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and
who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers,
until in 1843 he was to publish the _Sunday Times and Messenger_,
which continued for more than half a century.

From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall
Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night
dreaming over his _Elixir of Moonshine_, or, with the memory of his
afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his _Afara, or the
Belles of Broadway_, and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat
there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a
favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's
Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring,
soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown
tombstones.

On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked
down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a
young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young
then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under
discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned
man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote
a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was
published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he
needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a
few years this hymn, _My Faith Looks Up to Thee_, was to be sung
oftener than any other American hymn.

The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to
Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,--on