some friends the audience gave him a thunderous
ovation.

Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added _The Prairie_, _The
Red Rover_, _The Water Witch_, and _The Bravo_ to his list of
published books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from
Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of
pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the
neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in
appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and
Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be
picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live
there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a
house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed
work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the titles
_Sketches in Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_. But he made no
very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St.
Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpretentious
brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote
_Homeward Bound_ and began in earnest that fierce combat with his
critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a
regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house
he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home.

At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway,
between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every
pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet.
His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the
ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose
eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the
name of The Mad Poet.

[Illustration: THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831.]

If Broadway was his walk of an afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by
night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre
(literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his
centring point.

The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one.
It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor
thought himself cramped in space and opportunity and, moving away to
seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the
city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and
swords that ha