n has told of how he was once sent by a newspaper to
see Henry T. Tuckerman, in a big brown building in Tenth Street. This
studio building, just east of Sixth Avenue, is there yet, and the room
on the second floor where O'Brien had his talk with the scholarly
essayist and critic may be seen. At that time Tuckerman was writing
_The Criterion; or, The Test of Talk about Familiar Things_. In this
large room overlooking the street it was his custom on Sunday evenings
to entertain his literary friends.

Another home where there were Sunday-evening gatherings for many years
was that of Alice and Phoebe Cary. This house, one of the few
residences remaining in a neighborhood otherwise given up to business
structures to-day, is numbered 53 on East Twentieth Street. Here the
Carys lived when they made their home in this city, coming from their
Ohio birthplace to a wider field of activity. You can walk now into
the little parlor where the gatherings were held. You can go into the
room above, where Phoebe worked--when she found time; for in the
joint housekeeping of the sisters Phoebe often said that she had to
be the housekeeper before she could be the poet. In that room she
wrote, after coming from church one Sunday, the hymn which has made
her name famous and well-beloved, _Nearer My Home_.

[Illustration: 53 EAST 20th St.]

There on the same floor was the favorite work-corner of Alice, and
sitting close by the window, where she could look out into the street,
she wrote many of her poems of memory and of domestic affection. In
this room, too, she died.

To recite the names of those Sunday-evening callers would be to recall
all the writers in the city at that time, and to mention all those
prominent in the world of letters who came from out of town. James
Parton was often one of the company, in the days when he was arranging
the material for his _Life of Horace Greeley_, material gathered from
those who had known the great editor during his early days in New
Hampshire and Vermont. Greeley himself dropped in occasionally, and
also another member of the _Tribune_ staff, Richard Hildreth, the
writer from Massachusetts, who had been associate editor of the Boston
_Atlas_ and who in after years was United States Consul at Trieste.

Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time
when he was at work on his _Battle Pieces_, and could look back on
years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hardships that