"night life of the Park,
miniature figures strolling about under the trees, flashing in brilliant
light or swallowed up in dense shadow as they passed in the glare of
many lamps scattered among the budding foliage." Also over the Square,
regarded in the light of fiction, is the friendly shadow of Bunner, who
liked it at any time, but liked it best of all at night, with the great
dim branches swaying and breaking in the breeze, the gas lamps
flickering and blinking, when the tumults and the shoutings of the day
were gone and "only a tramp or something worse in woman's shape was
hurrying across the bleak space, along the winding asphalt, walking over
the Potter's Field of the past on the way to the Potter's Field to be."

[Illustration: "AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF FIFTY-FOURTH STREET IS THE
UNIVERSITY CLUB, TO THE MIND OF ARNOLD BENNETT ('YOUR UNITED STATES'),
THE FINEST OF ALL THE FINE STRUCTURES THAT LINE THE AVENUE"]

But to turn into the Avenue proper, and to follow the trail of the
novelists northward. At the very point of departure we are on the site
of the imaginary structure that gave the title to Leroy Scott's "No. 13
Washington Square," for the reason that there is no such number at all,
and that the house in question must have occupied the space between Nos.
12 and 14, respectively, on the east and west corners facing Waverly
Place. Before the next street is reached we have passed the home of the
Huntingdons of Edgar Fawcett's "A Hopeless Case," and at the southwest
corner of the Avenue and Eighth Street, facing the Brevoort, is No. 68
Clinton Place, which was not only the setting, but also the _raison
d'etre_ of Thomas A. Janvier's "A Temporary Deadlock." Almost diagonally
across the street is an old brick house, with Ionic pillars of marble
and a fanlight at the arched entrance--one of those houses that, to use
the novelist's words, "preserve unobtrusively, in the midst of a city
that is being constantly rebuilt, the pure beauty of Colonial
dwellings." It was the home of the Ferrols of Stephen French Whitman's
"Predestined," one of the books of real power that appear from time to
time, to be strangely neglected, and through that neglect to tempt the
discriminating reader to contempt for the literary judgment of his age.

At the northwest corner of Ninth Street there is a brownish-green
building erected in the long, long ago to serve as a domicile of the
Brevoort family, which had once exercised pastoral sway