e long, shrill city"; and ascribed to it, "a richer, riper
look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal
thoroughfare--the look of having had something of a social history."
That "richer, riper look," that suggestion of a past, is there to-day,
and is likely to be there tomorrow. The particular Sloper house is quite
easy of identification. It is the third from the corner as one goes
westward from the Avenue. In 1835, when Dr. Sloper first took
possession, moving uptown from the neighbourhood of the City Hall, which
had seen its best days socially, the Square, then the ideal of quiet and
genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling. The edifice in
which the Slopers lived and its neighbours were then thought to embody
the last results of architectural science. It actually dates to 1831.
Among the merchants who built in that year were Thomas Suffern, Saul
Allen, John Johnston, George Griswold, James Boorman, and William C.
Rhinelander. It was their type of house that was accepted for the
neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left
of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in
fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the
story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred
aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that
faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have
to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those
north-side dwellings. Robert Walmsley, of O. Henry's "The Defeat of the
City," lived there, and the boyhood to which he looked back was one
spent on an up-state farm; while another erstwhile tenant in the
exclusive row was the devious Artemas Quibble, of Mr. Arthur Train's
narrative, who began life humbly somewhere in grey New England, and
ended it, so far as the reader was informed, in Sing Sing Prison. Then
there was the home of Mrs. Martin, the "Duchess of Washington Square" of
Brander Matthews's "The Last Meeting," and that of Miss Grandish, of
Julian Ralph's "People We Pass," and the house of Mrs. Delaney, of Edgar
Fawcett's "Rutherford," and the structure which inspired one-half of
Edward W. Townsend's "Just Across the Square," and the five-room
apartment "at the top of a house with dormer windows on the north side"
where Sanford lived according to F. Hopkinson Smith's "Caleb West," and
where his guests, looking out, could see the