ade to New York. The tall figure of the author of the Saracinesca
novels was a familiar sight on the Avenue of the late nineties and the
first years of the present century. But his stays were brief. The call
of the vineyard-covered mountains about Sorrento was too strong.

From time to time the Avenue has seen literary visitors whose appearance
could not be regarded as a temporary home coming. Twenty years have
passed since Rudyard Kipling paid us his last visit, and it was a very
different Fifth Avenue from the street of today that he knew. But even
then it was a part of the town that moved him to dreams of "heavenly
loot." There was, until a year or two ago at least, in an office at
Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, an old cane-bottomed chair. Once it
had been in a room on the seventh story of a building at Fifth Avenue
and Twenty-first Street, and there it had been known as the Barrie
Chair, for in it the creator of Thrums had been wont to curl himself up,
and from its comfortable depths, peer through the window down at the
busy sidewalk below. In the church-going crowds of a Fifth Avenue Sunday
there are many who recall the sturdy figure of Dr. John Watson, the Ian
MacLaren of the "Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush" tales, who on several
occasions occupied a New York pulpit. The last time those who sat under
him saw a man apparently in the full vigour of rugged health. Yet a few
days later brought the news of his sudden death, far away from the
heather of his Scotland. The author of "The Beloved Vagabond" is no more
a stranger to the Avenue than he is to Bond Street, or the Rue de la
Paix; and Arnold Bennett has recorded impressions that are at once
disparaging and polite; and Jeffery Farnol used to trudge it,
impecunious and unknown, before "The Broad Highway" came to strike the
note of popular favour.

Many more are the names that might be mentioned, for the street has ever
been a magnet, and even those who toil in the attics of Bohemia find
their way here, in the hours of leisure, to see and to be observed.
Grub Street has assumed the garments of propriety, and shorn itself of
its long hair, and in the prosperous, well-dressed throng that surges up
and down the Fifth Avenue pavement, its denizens pass to and fro, no
longer shyly, furtively, and conspicuously out of place, but with the
easy assurance of those who are "to the manor born."

CHAPTER IX

_Fifth Avenue in Fiction_

Fifth Avenue in Fiction--Pa