y the
Elevated Railroad and overrun with hoards of noisy children and
tenement dwellers; a strange spot to look for memories of the
gentle-hearted Irving.

When Irving left New York in 1815, it was with no intention of
remaining away any length of time. In England he wrote _Rip Van
Winkle_, though he had never been in the Catskills, where the scene of
his classic lay. In Paris he met John Howard Payne, and the two worked
together, in the Rue Richelieu, adapting French plays to English
representation--but this partnership came to little. He went to Spain
and there, while writing the _Life and Voyages of Columbus_, he met a
young man then fitting himself by travel to enter on the duties of
Professor of Modern Languages in Bowdoin College. This was Henry W.
Longfellow, unknown then as a poet. While in Spain, Irving occupied
the Governor's quarters in the Alhambra, an otherwise deserted palace,
abiding there in a kind of Oriental dream, and living over in
imagination the _Conquest of Granada_. Back in London again as
Secretary of the Legation to the Court of St. James, he arranged his
material for the _Voyages of the Companions of Columbus_, and half a
dozen other works. Then, after seventeen years of wandering, he
returned to his native city.

Although he tells us that his heart throbbed at sight of New York, and
that in all his travels he had seen no place that caused such a thrill
of joy, it was no longer the city of his youth. He had left a town of
one hundred thousand people and found a city of two hundred thousand.
The companions of his youth had grown to be men, and many of them were
renowned in literature and business life. He found streets grown long
out of all remembrance, houses tall beyond all knowing, strangers who
knew him simply as a name. He found many silent graves where he had
left blooming youth. But for all this there were many ready and
anxious to do him honor.

A few steps beyond Trinity Churchyard on Broadway is a narrow
thoroughfare called Thames Street. It is easy to be found, and beside
it is a tall building on which is a tablet relating how the Burns's
Coffee-House once stood on the spot. This had been a mansion built by
Etienne De Lancey, a Huguenot noble, and Thames Street was the
carriage-way that led to the door. In this coffee-house the merchants
of the city signed the Non-Importation Agreement in the days before
the Revolution.

When Irving returned to the city the coffee-house was gon