ously loose, and to that fertile brain were flashed
the ingredients of "The Fifth Wheel." "There is an aristocracy of the
public parks and even of the vagabonds who use them for their private
apartments," wrote Sidney Porter in "The Shocks of Doom." Vallance of
the story felt rather than knew this, but when he stepped down out of
his world into chaos his feet brought him directly to Madison Square.
Probably Sherard Plumer, the down-and-out artist, was another to
recognize its quality even before he fell in with Carson Chalmers, as
outlined in "A Madison Square Arabian Night"; and also Marcus Clayton of
Roanoke County, Virginia, and Eva Bedford, of Bedford County of the same
State; and the disreputable Soapy, of "The Cop and the Anthem," when he
sought a park bench on which to ponder over just what violation of the
law would insure his deportation to Blackwell's Island, which was his
Palm Beach and Riviera for the winter months. Here, to O. Henry, was the
common ground of all, the happy and the unfortunate, the just and the
unjust, the Caliph and the cad; and far above, against the sky, was the
dainty goddess who presided over the destinies of all, Miss Diana, who,
according to the opinion expressed by Mrs. Liberty in "The Lady Higher
Up," has the best job for a statue in the whole town, with the Cat-Show,
and the Horse-Show, and the military tournaments where the privates
"look grand as generals, and the generals try to look grand as
floorwalkers," and the Sportsman's Show, and above all, the French Ball,
"where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance
the Highland fling with one another."

Other figures of fiction, in fancy, flit across the Square, or throng
the near-by streets. In that dense, pushing, alien-tongued multitude
that at the noon hour congests the sidewalks of the Avenue to the south
of Twenty-third Street, one may catch a glimpse of Mr. Montague Glass's
Abe Potash and Morris Perlmutter, long since moved uptown from their
original loft in Division Street in the stories, and in Leonard Street
in fact. The crowd is thickest at the Twenty-first Street corner, where,
in the novels of other days, the mature burghers used to watch the
passing ladies from the windows of the Union Club. But there is little
inclination to tarry long there. The environment of the Square is a
pleasanter environment. When Delmonico's was at the Twenty-sixth Street
corner, the hero of one of Brander Matthews's "