rom old England." The
Carnegie house is almost the outpost to the north of "Millionaire's
Row." Two blocks beyond, after the I. Townsend Burden house, and the
Warburg house, and the Willard D. Straight house have been passed, we
are once more in the region of unprepossessing chaos. Between
Ninety-third Street and the end of the Park there is a riot of hideous
signboards, and vacant lots, and lots that though occupied, are
unadorned. The only relief in the unpleasant picture is the Mount Sinai
Hospital at One Hundredth Street. In name at least the Avenue marches
on, its progress being suspended for a space where Mount Morris Park
rises to the summit of the Snag Berg, or Snake Hill, where, in the days
of the Revolution, a Continental battery for a moment commanded the
valley of the Harlem, only to be whisked away, when the enemy came, and
a Hessian battery was installed in its place. But where the stretch of
magnificence breaks, although it continues to be Fifth Avenue in name,
it ceases to be Fifth Avenue in spirit.

CHAPTER XIX

_Mine Host on the Avenue_

Mine Host on the Avenue--A Gentleman of Brussels--Poulard's--Some Old
New York Hotels--High Prices of 1836--The American--The
Metropolitan--Holt's--The Brevoort and the Steamship
Captains--Delmonico's--Famous Menus--The Glory of the Fifth Avenue--The
Logerot--A Bohemian Chop-house--The Great Mince Pie Contest--About
Madison Square--Lost Youth.

Is there anything that civilized man recalls more poignantly than the
menus of yesterday? Of the Brussels of the winter of 1917, the last
winter that the Americans of the Commission for Relief were allowed to
remain, I have many vivid memories. One of them is of a crowd gathered
before a shop-window in the Rue de Namur, a street that winds down from
the circle of boulevards to the Place Royale. Within, the object of
hungry curiosity, a fowl, adorned by a placard informing that the price
is forty-four francs. Conspicuous in the crowd, his face pressed against
the glass of the _etalage_, a little old gentleman. The bowl of
municipal soup and the loaf of bread are all that he has to look forward
to as the day's sustenance. But as he gazes his mouth waters
quiveringly, and for the moment the grey-green uniforms of the invaders
that are all about him, and the hated flag that is flying over the
Palais de Justice are forgotten. Soon he will go home and sit down and
write a letter to _La Belgique_, in which he will recall