ity of today in mind we wonder how they managed it, by what
charm and persuasion they gathered with such regularity so many of the
_literati_ really worth while. But it was a smaller town then. It was
easier to be neighbourly. When Thackeray, on the evening of New Year's
Day, 1853, journeyed in a sleigh from his hotel to a reception held in a
house on the west side of Fifth Avenue between Thirty-seventh and
Thirty-eighth Streets, the destination was characterized as a villa in
the country.

To revert to the note with which this chapter began. Were it possible
for us to be transported back to the London of the fifties the sight of
a Thackeray, a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Browning would not have been
necessary to stir our pulses. It would have been an event to have seen
in the flesh some of the humbler men, G.P.R. James, or Samuel Warren, of
"Ten Thousand a Year," or any of the ephemeral celebrities who adorned
the pages of the Maclise Gallery of Portraits. So why disdain, merely
because they are of our own time, the makers of copy who may be seen on
the Fifth Avenue of today? I remember my first literary walk down the
Avenue. It was in the company of Mr. Edward W. Townsend. I was very
young, and he was the creator of Chimmie Fadden, and the author of "A
Daughter of the Tenements," and I wished that all the world might see.
Then the time came when the sight of literary faces was less of a
novelty, when it was not unusual to meet the author of "The Rise of
Silas Lapham," who had left his home on Fifty-ninth Street, facing the
Park, for an afternoon stroll, and to receive his nod of kindly
recognition; or to pass Edmund Clarence Stedman, to whom I owed, as so
many others have owed, the first words of encouragement, or to see Frank
R. Stockton, or Mr. Gilder and Mr. Johnson of the "Century," or Brander
Matthews on his way to the club in West Forty-third Street.

Looking down upon the Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-third Street, just
below the Waldorf, are familiar windows. They belonged to a hotel that
was, or is, the Cambridge, and in the rooms behind the windows, I recall
occasional pleasant and profitable hours spent in the company of Richard
Harding Davis. There was another window some blocks farther down, in the
building occupying the point where Fifth Avenue and Broadway join. That
window gave light to the workshop of James L. Ford, the obstinate
satirist, who resents the charge of amiability, and who will not be
ple