aylor, the poet Stoddard, and
Boker, who wrote 'Francesca da Rimini,' which Miss Julia Dean is playing
at Wallack's. Beyond them is Edmund Clarence Stedman, with lawyers David
Dudley Field and Charles O'Connor. The second table from the door is
claimed by Sparrow Grass Cozzens and Fitz-James O'Brien, who have
adjourned from Pfaff's beer-cellar near Leonard Street, where, under the
Broadway sidewalk, they were quaffing lager and getting up quite an
appetite on onions, pretzels, and cheese. They have with them Walt
Whitman, who, silent and wholly wanting in that barbaric yawp, is
distinguished by what William Dean Howells, ever slopping over in his
phrase-making, will one day speak of as his 'branching beard and Jovian
hair.' The theatres have a place in the Leland cafe, and that dark,
thin-faced scimetar-nosed Jewish woman, who coughs a great deal, is the
French actress, Rachel. She has been playing at the New York Theatre,
and caught a cold on that overventilated stage, as open to the winds as
a sawmill, which will kill her within a year. With her are the singer,
Brignoli, and that man of orchestras, Theodore Thomas. The sepulchral
Herman Melville enters, and saunters funereally across to Taylor,
Stoddard, and Boker. Rachel and Brignoli are talking of the operatic
failure at the Academy of Music under Manager Payne. They speak, too, of
Mrs. Wood's success at Wallack's, and of Burton's reopening of the old
Laura Keene Theatre, in Broadway across from Bond. Thomas mentions the
accident at Niblo's the other evening, when Pauline Genet, of the Revel
troupe, was so savagely burned. Speculation enlists O'Connor, Stedman,
and Field, and Field is prophesying impending money troubles, which
prophecies the panic six months away will largely bear out."

Then, quietly at first, but none the less surely, Fifth Avenue began to
play its part to the town and to the visiting stranger. Now that the
Astor House and the old Fifth Avenue Hotel are gone it is to the
Brevoort, or the Lafayette-Brevoort, just as you choose to call it, that
one turns to find the ghosts of yesterday. They are nothing to shy at,
being comfortable, well-fed spirits, compositely cosmopolitan. For
legend has it that the management in the old days was particularly
gracious to the captains of the transatlantic steamers when they were in
this port, and the seamen were correspondingly appreciative. So as the
vessel was passing the Nantucket Lightship the titled Englishma