it's beautiful, and more remarkable than people know.

"Uptowners, outsiders, come in here and insist on getting in; and, fed
on the sort of false stuff that goes out through 'novelists' and
'reporters,' think that anything will go in the Liberal Club! They
come here and insult the women members, and we all end up in a free
fight every week or so. All the fault of the writers who got us wrong
in the first place, and handed on the wrong impression to the
world...."

The studio quarters of the Village are located in various places--the
South Side of Washington Square, the little lost courts and streets
and corners everywhere, and--Macdougal Alley, Washington Mews, and
the new, rather stately structures on Eighth Street, which are almost
too grand for real artists and yet which have attracted more than a
few nevertheless. I suppose that the Alley,--jutting off from the
famous street named for Alexander Macdougal,--is the best known.

I remember that once, some years ago, I was hurrying, by a short cut,
from Eighth Street to Waverly Place, and saw something which made me
stop short in amazement. As unexpectedly as though it had suddenly
sprung there, I beheld a little street running at right angles from
me, parallel with Eighth, but ending, like a _cul de sac_, in houses
like those with which it was edged. It was a quaint and
foreign-looking little street and seemed entirely out of place in New
York,--and especially out of place plunged like that into the middle
of a block.

But that was not the oddest part of it. In that street stood talking a
girl in gorgeous Spanish dress and a man in Moorish costume. The warm
reds and greens and russets of their garments made an unbelievable
patch of colour in the grey March day. And this in New York!

A friendly truck driver, feeding his horses, saw my bewilderment, and
laughed.

[Illustration: A GREENWICH STUDIO. Choosing models.]

"That's Macdougal's Alley," he volunteered.

That meant nothing to me then.

"What is it?" I demanded, devoured by curiosity; "the stage door of a
theatre,--or what?"

He laughed again.

"It is just Macdougal's Alley!" he repeated, as though that explained
everything.

So it did, when I came to find out about it.

The Alley and Washington Mews are probably the most famous artist
quarters in the city, and some of our biggest painters and sculptors
once had studios in one or the other,--those, that is, that haven't
them still. Of course the