ure for the comfort or luxury of the inmates is at hand.
Nor are such residences few in number. They may be counted by the
hundred, each with its contents worth a large fortune. The style of
living is in keeping with the house, and, as a matter of course, only the
very wealthy can afford such homes.

As for the occupants, they represent all classes--the good and the bad,
the cultivated and the illiterate, the refined and the vulgar, the
well-born and those who have risen from the gutters. If shoddy finds a
home here, genuine merit is his neighbor. Those who have large and
assured incomes can afford such a style of life; but they do not comprise
all the dwellers on the Avenue. Many are here who have strained every
nerve to "get into the Avenue," and who would sell body and soul to stay
there, yet who feel that the crash is coming before which they must give
way. Others there are who would give half their possessions to move in
the society in which their neighbors live. They reside on the Avenue,
but they are ignored by one class of its occupants, because of their lack
of refinement and cultivation, and by another because of their
inferiority in wealth. Great wealth covers a multitude of defects in the
Avenue.

Perhaps the most restless, care-worn faces in the city are to be seen on
this street. Women clad in the richest attire pass you with unquiet face
and wistful eyes, and men who are envied by their fellows for their "good
luck," startle you by the stern, hard set look their features wear. The
first find little real happiness in the riches they have sold themselves
for, and the latter find that the costly pleasures they courted have been
gained at too dear a price.

[Picture: THE NEW RESIDENCE OF A. T. STEWART, ESQ.]

Families are small in the Avenue, and Madame Restelle boasts, that her
wealth has been earned in a large degree by keeping them so. Fashion has
its requirements, and before them maternity must give way. Your
fashionable lady has no time to give to children, but pets lap-dogs and
parrots.

Well, the Avenue mansions have their skeletons, as well as the east side
tenement houses. The sin of the fashionable lady is covered up, however,
and the poor girl must face the world. That is the difference. Madame
married her husband for his money, and her love is given to one who has
no right to claim it; and what between her loathing for her liege lord
and her dread of detection, she l