pate
conspicuously in a boulevard cafe, or the author of "The Mysteries of
Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" posing at a table in the Restaurant de
Paris or Bignon's, or the fat figure of M. de Balzac waddling in the
direction of a printing house to toil and groan and sweat over the
proofs of the latest addition to the "Comedie Humaine." We cannot behold
such giants in our generation, city, and street. Yet Fifth Avenue, from
the day the first houses pushed northward from Washington Square, has
had its literary landmarks, figures, and traditions.

Ten years ago, had you been passing of a summer's day a house at the
southeast corner of the Avenue and Ninth Street, you might have seen
emerging from the front door, a figure clad in white flannel, and
looked upon the countenance of the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn. It was, and is, a house of red brick, a house of three stories and
a high basement, built by the architect who had designed Grace Church.
The number is 21. Clemens went to live there in the autumn of 1904,
remaining for a time at the near-by Grosvenor while the new habitation
was being put in order, and the home furniture that had been brought
from Hartford was being installed. When No. 21 was ready for occupation,
only Clemens and his daughter Jean went to live there, for Clara had not
recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness, and the shock of
her death, and was in retirement under the care of a trained nurse.
Clemens, according to his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, was lonely
in No. 21, and sought to liven matters by installing a great AEolian
Orchestrelle. In January, 1906, Paine paid his first visit to the house
and found the great man propped up in bed, with his head at the foot,
turning over the pages of "Huckleberry Finn" in search of a paragraph
about which some random correspondent had asked explanation.

But to go back long before Clemens's time, and to begin in the
neighbourhood of the old square. In the days when Fifth Avenue was
young Poe must have found his way there, accompanied, perhaps, by the
pale, invalided Virginia, to gaze at the fine new houses, for only a few
hundred yards away was his last city residence, where Lowell called and
found his host "not himself that day," and where were penned "The Facts
in the Case of M. Valdemar," the "Philosophy of Composition," and "The
Literati of New York." Then there was the house in Waverly Place, the
home of Anne Lynch, the