how
disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it
as impressive as it should have been as coming from the author and
editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident
occurred within a year or two of "Peter Parley's" death.

That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor
of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia,
where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had
removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much
interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great
distance away, and often came to talk with Phoebe Cary about that
institution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her
regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had
written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers, _I Would Not Live
Alway_. Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church of the Holy
Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested
to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken
half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be
used to found an institution for the care of the sick poor. The fund
started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of
St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual
hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near
Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at
Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those
quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on
Cathedral Heights.

Chapter XII

Some of the Writers of To-Day

There is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York
to-day, where buildings are too towering, too massive, too thickly
clustered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the
homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace
surroundings with more than passing interest.

In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a
hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many
reminders of those friends whose books are on the most easily reached
library shelf.

To No. 10 West Street, that stands on the river front, Robert Louis
Stevenson was taken by a fellow-voyager in 1879; here he stopped the
first night he spent in America, and of this house he wrote in the
_Amateur Emigrant_