. From the waterside just at dusk, catching a dim
outline of the varying housetops is to glimpse some old castle of
feudal times. The lowest building in all this block is No. 10--a
meagre, dingy, two-story structure that has come to be very old. The
doors and windows seem to have been made for some other building, and
to be trying to get back to where they belong, bulging out in the
struggle and making rents in the house-front.

[Illustration: No. 10 West St.]

Crossing Battery Park to State Street, at No. 17 is the tall
Chesebrough building that has sprung up on the spot where William
Irving, brother of Washington, lived, and where the Salmagundi wits
gathered sometimes in the evening. Two or three doors farther along is
a survival of old New York which delights the eye, with its porticoes
and oval windows, odd appearing and many-sided; a mansion when wealth
and affluence clustered around the Battery. This is the scene of the
first few chapters of Bunner's _Story of a New York House_. Around the
corner and through the wide doors of the Produce Exchange, at the back
of that building and literally hidden in the middle of the block, is
an old street that seems to have lost its usefulness, a quaint and
curious way full half a century and more behind the times, now bearing
the name of Marketfield Street, but once called Petticoat Lane. It is
no longer a thoroughfare, for in its length of half a block it has
neither beginning nor end. Here is all that is left of the house in
which Julia Ward Howe was born.

Passing along Broad Street, where Edmund C. Stedman, the poet and
financier, has an office close to Wall Street, you come in a few
minutes to the Custom House. To enter that building is to get lost in
a moment. Pass through the door into a veritable trackless wilderness
of narrow black halls, with rooms that open in the most unexpected
corners, and come after a while to the Debenture Room of old, and to
the window near which Richard Henry Stoddard had his desk for close
upon twenty years.

Freed from the intricacies of the old building, continue the stroll
up-town, and in Park Row, at No. 29, on the third floor, is found the
old home of the _Commercial Advertiser_, where Jesse Lynch Williams
worked, and wrote _A City Editor's Conscience_, and other stories. A
little way farther on is the _Tribune_ building, where William Winter
has his den, and under the same roof the room where Irving Bacheller
conducted a newspaper