it was close upon the year 1840,--when the
Astor House was a new structure talked about all over the land as a
wonderful palace. On the ground floor of this hotel John R. Bartlett
kept a well stocked book-shop, and not a day but it was much visited
by the literary folk of the town, for he was the friend of all bookish
people. He himself was a quiet, scholarly man, and it was there in his
shop, when his many friends left him leisure for work, that he
arranged the greater part of his _Dictionary of Americanisms_, by
which his name is remembered far better than by his historical
records,--remembered when the fact that he was Secretary of State in
Rhode Island is quite forgotten if it was ever widely known.

One of the familiar figures in Bartlett's book-shop was a keen-eyed,
spectacled man who walked with quite a noticeable limp. This was
Charles Fenno Hoffman, a notable man of his time, whose song,
_Sparkling and Bright_, was on everybody's tongue. Thirty-four years
of his life were behind him, years that were full to overflowing. He
was a New Yorker in the full meaning of the term, and many of the
events of his active life had centred about the little book-shop. His
birthplace was only eight blocks away, there where the structure of
the Elevated Road throws its shadow over Greenwich Street at its
crossing with Rector. Those interested searchers who have visited the
house where Washington Irving boarded close by this same corner will
find the house where Hoffman was born nearby it. Thoughts of Irving
and Hoffman entwine themselves naturally and closely, for Hoffman's
half-sister was that Matilda who was affianced to Irving and whose
early death shadowed his whole life.

Just around the corner from Bartlett's shop Hoffman went to school at
Columbia College, where the present Park Place now wends its way from
the river to Printing House Square. After leaving college he studied
law, but soon gave up that profession to become the associate editor
of the _American_ as the commencement of a literary career. In 1833 he
founded the _Knickerbocker_ magazine, and while conducting it enjoyed
the intimate fellowship of Harry Franco, William Cullen Bryant, Lewis
Gaylord Clark, William L. Stone, the brothers Duyckinck, Frederick S.
Cozzens, Park Benjamin, John L. Stephens, and a great many others in
the same field of writing.

All this was behind him when he became a familiar figure in Bartlett's
shop; and more, too, for he had wor