the hearth logs
blazed and the fair faces flickered in the flames in those pages of Mr.
Donald G. Mitchell!--and George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"; and the
latter book was one of the first in which was to be found the flavour
of the old Fifth Avenue. Then there were the forgotten novelists of the
seventies and early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such
as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting
Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction
had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of
inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone
period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but
marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck
chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago.
That was the late Archibald Clavering Gunter. The present generation
knows him and his works not at all; but how a past generation used to
read and reread "Mr. Barnes of New York," and "Mr. Potter of Texas," and
"Miss Nobody of Nowhere," and "That Frenchman," which should have been
called "M. De Vernay of Paris." Those were the earliest and the "big
four." The list of successors is a long one, but that certain something,
that indefinable quality, which had made the first books great trash was
irrevocably gone. Of all the flamboyant characters of the tales Mr.
Barnes was deservedly the most popular, and at such times as he was not
winning international rifle matches at Monte Carlo, or racing about
Europe in respectable pursuit of desirable young ladies, he inhabited a
dwelling on lower Fifth Avenue. Practically all Fifth Avenue were the
scenes of "Miss Nobody of Nowhere," with its charming heroine and her
adopted parents, its wicked English nobleman, and its comical little
Anglo-maniac dude. Under some name or other a "Gussie Van Beekman" was a
necessary ingredient of every Gunter novel.

It is a far cry from Gunter to Henry James, though each wrought
according to his lights, and served his purpose in his time. It was when
the Avenue was in its infancy that Dr. Sloper, of James's "Washington
Square," went to live in the brick house with white stone trimmings,
that, practically unchanged, may be seen today, diagonally across the
street from the Arch. The novelist wrote of the locality as having "a
kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other
quarters of th