nd little patches of grass. The
chocolate factory still diffuses its pleasant candied whiff. At
noontime the street is full of the high-spirited pupils of the
Washington Irving High School. As for the Irving house itself, it is
getting a new coat of paint. The big corset works, we dare say, has
come since O. Henry's time. We had quite an adventure there once. We
can't remember how it came about, but for some reason or other we
went to that building to see the chief engineer. All we can remember
about it was that he had been at sea at one time, and we went to see
him on some maritime errand. We found that he and his family lived
in a comfortable apartment on the roof of the factory, and we
remember making our way, with a good many blushes, through several
hundred or thousand young ladies who were industriously working away
at their employer's business and who seemed to us to be giggling
more than necessary. After a good deal of hunting we found our way
to a secret stair and reached our seafaring engineer of the corset
factory in his eyrie, where (we remember) there were oil paintings
of ships on the walls and his children played about on the roof as
though on the deck of a vessel.

Irving Place is also very rich in interesting little
shops--laundries, tailors, carpenters, stationers, and a pleasant
bookshop. It is a haunt of hand-organ men. The cool tavern at the
corner of Eighteenth, where Con Delaney tended the bar in the days
when O. Henry visited it, is there still. All along the little byway
is a calm, genteel, domestic mood, in spite of the encroachments of
factories and apartment houses. There are window boxes with flowers,
and a sort of dim suffusion of conscious literary feeling. One has a
suspicion that in all those upper rooms are people writing short
stories. "Want to see a freak?" asks the young man in the bookshop
as we are looking over his counters. We do, of course, and follow
his animated gesture. Across the street comes a plump young woman,
in a very short skirt of a violent blue, with a thick mane of bobbed
hair, carrying her hat in her hand. She looks rather comfortable and
seemly to us, but something about her infuriates the bookseller. He
is quite Freudian in his indignation that any young woman should
habit herself so. We wonder what the psycho-analyst a few blocks
below would say about it. And walking a few paces further, one comes
upon the green twitter, the tended walks and pink geranium beds o