more dignified men drifted away, and the tables in the dining room
rang with the laughter and high talk of a younger group, known as the
"Griffou Push." Brave dreams were there, and limitless ambitions, and
some achievement. But in many cases _Pallida mors_ came knocking all too
soon, and those who lived sought other environments, and the "Push" was
no more, and the little hotel became a memory of yesterday.

There were literary associations about the old Studio Building in Tenth
Street long before the "Old Masters" of New York went there to work, and
Carmencita came to dance in Chase's studio. In the big brown structure
Henry T. Tuckerman once lived, and kept his library, and wrote "The
Criterion," and the "Book of the Artists," and entertained his friends
of the world of letters; and there Fitzjames O'Brien, the genial Fitz,
the "gipsy of letters," the author of "The Diamond Lens," visited him.
Almost across the street, in a little rear wooden house that was to
serve as the New York home of F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of
Cartersville, was at one time the quarters of the Tile Club, where, in
the golden days, men ceased to be known by the stiff and formal names
used in more ceremonious surroundings, and became instead the Owl, or
the Griffin, or the Pagan, or the Chestnut, or the Puritan, or the
O'Donoghue, or the Bone, or the Grasshopper, or the Marine, or the
Terrapin, or the Gaul, or the Bulgarian, or Briareus, or Sirius, or
Cadmius, or Polyphemus.

A little off the Avenue, on East Twentieth Street, was the home of the
Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe; and to the unpretentious little brick
dwelling of Sunday evenings repaired Stoddard, and Whittier, and
Aldrich, and Ripley, and Herman Melville, and Mary L. Booth, who
afterwards became Mrs. Lamb, and wrote the "History of New York," and
Samuel G. Goodrich, the famous "Peter Parley," and Alice Haven, popular
writer of juvenile tales, and Justin McCarthy, and James Parton, husband
of "Fanny Fern," himself one of these rare scribes of his age whose
writing can be genuinely enjoyed by readers of the present generation,
and occasionally, grim old Horace Greeley, who, if, as he said, in the
course of forty years had never been able to get a day off to go
"a-fishing," managed, now and then, to find an evening of leisure in
which to divert himself with the pleasant, bookish talk at No. 53. A
_salon_ as "was a _salon_"--that of the Cary girls. With the vast,
unwieldy c