over so many
acres of this region. Later it became the home of the De Rhams. But to
Richard Harding Davis, then a reporter on the "Evening Sun," it had
nothing of the flavour of the Patroons. It was simply the house where
young Cortlandt Van Bibber, returning from Jersey City where he had
witnessed the "go" between "Dutchy" Mack and a coloured person
professionally known as the Black Diamond, found his burglar. There is
no mistaking the house, which "faced the avenue," nor the stone wall
that ran back to the brown stable which opened on the side street, nor
the door in the wall, that, opening cautiously, showed Van Bibber the
head of his quarry. "The house was tightly closed, as if some one was
lying inside dead," was a line of Mr. Davis's description. Many years
after the writing of "Van Bibber's Burglar," another maker of fiction
associated with New York was standing before the Ninth Street house, of
the history of which he knew nothing. "Grim tragedy lives there, or
should live there," said Owen Johnson, "I never pass here without the
feeling that there is some one lying dead inside."

Van Bibber's presence in the neighbourhood was in no wise surprising,
for it was one of his favourite haunts when he was not engaged farther
up the Avenue, in his daily labour, which was, as he explained to the
chance acquaintance met at the ball in Lyric Hall described in
"Cinderella," "mixing cocktails at the Knickerbocker Club." Only a few
doors distant from the Ninth Street house there is an apartment hotel
known as the Berkeley, and it was to a Berkeley apartment that Van
Bibber, as related in "Her First Appearance," took the child that he had
practically kidnapped to restore her to her father and to be rewarded
for his intrusion by being sensibly called a well-meaning fool. But
there is another apartment house at the south-west corner of the Avenue
and Twenty-eighth Street which better fits the description, which tells
how Van Bibber, from the windows, could see the many gas lamps of
Broadway where it crossed the Avenue a few blocks away, and the bunches
of light on Madison Square Garden.

Edgar Fawcett was hardly of the generation of the Flora McFlimseys. As a
matter of fact he was a small boy in knickerbockers when the famous
William Allen Butler poem, "Nothing to Wear," first appeared in the
pages of "Harper's Weekly." But Miss McFlimsey was an enduring young
lady, who, for many years was accepted as symbolizing the foibles