ional business house. Take an idle hour and picture it in
memory; that will be better. Thinking of it now it is quite natural to
contrast it with modern eating- and drinking-houses, famous for their
mirror-lined walls, richly carved appointments, carpeted floors, and
flashing electric lights. Pfaff's was a hole beneath the surface of
the street, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-kept. But it is far
better to read George Arnold's poem embodying the spirit of the
cellar, and recording how the company was "very merry at Pfaff's."
This poet was one of the merry company in the days when he wrote
regularly for the columns of _Vanity Fair_. He has himself said that
some of the poems were written in the late hours after an evening
spent in the underground Broadway resort with Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, with
Mortimer Thomson, the famous "Q. K. Philander Doesticks," and a score
of like writers. It was Arnold, too, who caused an hour of sadness
when he took there the story of the death of Henry W. Herbert, who was
well known to all the habitues. They all knew his life's story; they
had heard him tell of his father, the Dean of Manchester and cousin to
the Earl of Carnarvon; they had heard him tell how he had come to New
York from London, how he had taught in the school in Beaver Street
near Whitehall, and how in that little school he had partly written
his historical romance _Cromwell_, and how he had mapped out some of
the others that followed it. They knew, too, how he had, under the
name of "Frank Forester," produced such books as _American Game in its
Season_, _The Horse and Horsemanship in North America_, and become
famous by novel-writing. He was the first to introduce sports of the
field into fiction in America. Some of his comrades knew the
unhappiness that had crept into his life, but even his dearest friends
were not prepared for the news which Arnold brought one day, that
"Frank Forester" had died by his own hand in a room on the second
floor of the Stevens House, there in Broadway by the Bowling Green,
not more than the throw of a stone from the place where, in his early
days in New York, he had taught school.

Another friend of George Arnold's, who sometimes spent hours with him
at Pfaff's, was George Farrar Browne, but few will remember him by
this name, while many will recall that which he made famous, Artemus
Ward. He had passed his apprenticeship as a printer and reporter, had
made the country ring with the name of the live