The warehouse where he
was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John
Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street
by the waterside. Drake ofttimes took that walk and sat there by the
side of his friend's desk. Often, too, in the late afternoon, Halleck
walked from there to the green that since has been called the City
Hall Park, and sat until Drake came from his studies in the nearby
College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college was part of Columbia,
which lay to the west of the green. In time the city overgrew the
college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering
where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray
Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From
the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway
below Trinity Church--then the fashionable promenade,--and so on to
the Battery, past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past
where Paulding was then living.

The time came when Drake was graduated, and then there were the long
evenings together back of his office in the store numbered 121 Bowery,
just above Hester Street. From this house the friends made their long
excursions across the Harlem River, far beyond the town, into the
romantic Bronx of which Drake sang so often and so well.

One night, starting from the Bowery shop, Drake took Halleck down
Broadway into Thames Street, and there, back of the City Hotel, dined
him in a dingy little public house, the first of many pleasant
evenings there. It was the ale-house kept by William Reynolds, a
genial, red-faced man who had been a grave-digger in the nearby
Trinity Churchyard.

The tavern remained a place of entertainment for close upon a hundred
years, most of the time known as "Old Tom's," from Reynolds's
successor. It came to be a landmark for the curious, but as the
curious always stood outside and never by any chance went in to buy of
what was on sale there, it went the way of all old places. To-day, if
you turn into Thames Street, from busy Broadway, you come upon a mass
of buildings in perpetual shade, and with a decidedly provincial air
not at all in keeping with the up-to-date city. A walk of half a block
brings you to Temple Street--a thoroughfare leading nowhere in
particular, but which wise chroniclers have quarrelled over, some
urging that it came by its name because of being close by Trinity
Church, which is a tem