had
supplied him with the material from which to write so much that was
odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which
Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told
it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of
his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and
adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New
York, of his shipping as a common sailor, and of his youthful
wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fashion, and with
picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to
the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close
attention while he related the coarse brutality of his captain, who
had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his
wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on the
island of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He
related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever
escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not
desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by
day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered
those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in
his successful _Typee_. It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in
strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of
the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary
sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there
see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where
he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man,
he died.

Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and
with them she talked over a great many details of her _History of the
City of New York_, which she was at that time energetically engaged
upon. And there this future editor of _Harper's Bazar_ met Martha J.
Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the
two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical
lines, and led to her publishing, some seventeen years later, her
_History of New York_, and to her assuming, in 1883, the editorship of
the _Magazine of American History_. Mary L. Booth used to tell very
amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as
"Peter Parley," at the little house in Twentieth Street, and