suggestion of Arabian Night adventures, when the region was still virginal to settlement workers, reformers, and selfadvertising politicians, before the street cleaner, the Board of Health, and other destroyers of the picturesque were in evidence. He recalls the night of adventure when, in company with the painter and the professor, hours of delightful exploration led finally to the Hall of Genius, which was supposed to reproduce the atmosphere of Montmartre, and

JAMES HUNEKER, IN THE DAYS OF BOHEMIA. THIS PORTRAIT IS DESCRIBED BY MR. HUNEKER AS PRESENTING "A GHASTLY FACE, FULL OF DOSTOIEVSKY AND PILSEN"

where the "celebrities" were thick. There were pointed out the young fellow who had written the best short story since Edgar Allan Poe-a story so good that no one dreamed of printing it-the fat youth who was a second Ernest Lawson, but who had never seen a Lawson landscape because he had never got farther than Second Avenue; the "grandest dramatist of the age" without a Broadway production; the woman who had Duse, Bernhardt, and Nazimova "beaten

to a pulp" as actresses; the Russian pianist with "the charm of Paderewski, the magic of Joseffy, the technique of Rosenthal, and the caprice of De Pachmann."

It would demand the resources of a Dostoievsky to paint our East Side in all its exotic, variegated, and bewildering colours. No genius of less calibre than that of Fyodor Mihailovitch's could essay the giant task. Where is he? Here is the raw, rich material for the great American novel. But where is the novelist? Let me suggest that only an American of Celtic brilliancy, Teutonic profundity, English intellectuality, French art, and the idealism of the Slavic Hebrew could compass the theme.

Was not Thackeray, conjuring up some past Bohemia, forever prating of the Cider Cellar and Terré's Tavern? Did not Du Maurier, writing of his three musketeers of the brush in the Paris days of the Second Empire, dwell with particular relish on the occasions when they dined at the Trois Frères Provençaux or some less distinguished hostelry? What would Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohême be without the Café Momus, or Balzac's Illusions Perdues without Flicoteaux? So Mr. Huneker, recalling that New York of twenty-odd years ago, lays especial stress on the old English chop-houses, French and Italian table d'hôtes, German beer gardens, most of which are no more. There was, in Fourth Avenue at Twenty-first Street, one chop-house, small but delightful, where he listened an entire evening to the muted conversation of Rudyard Kipling, who had been piloted to the house by his brother-in-law, Wolcott Balestier. There, too, assembled nightly actors, mostly from the Lyceum Theatre, in the palmy days of Daniel Frohman, and there came the prince of talkers, Maurice Barrymore. "Do they still eat macaroni and consume Chianti in New York?" asks Mr. Huneker. "If they do, show me a Moretti-like the old Moretti in Fourteenth Street and in Twenty-first Street-a Martinelli (in

Fifth Avenue), a Solari-in University Place a Riccadonna in Union Square, or even a Pedro's in Centre Street." From these the road through Bohemia led to Cockroach Hall

Green peppers, saffron, roach and dace, All this you get at Terré's Tavern In that one dish of Bouillebaisse

and finally to Maria del Prato's in West Twelfth Street, "where 'Mickey Finn' threw bread at you and you liked the poetic attention."

"Hop" Smith

With the death of Francis Hopkinson Smith, on the 7th of April, a personality passed, an exceedingly vital, expansive and forcible personality. The fact that he was well along in the eighth decade of his life meant little. The last time the writer of these paragraphs saw him the figure was as erect as it had been fifteen years before, the swagger as jaunty, the white mustaches as sweeping, the manner as genial and as debonair. In the library, down three little steps in his home at No. 150 East Thirty-fourth Street, New York City, the fire blazed as cheerily as ever, and with the same genial manner the host waved the visitor to the chair before it. "The fire is my friend," said Colonel Carter of Cartersville, and somehow one always felt that the fire was F. Hopkinson Smith's friend.

To the end F. Hopkinson Smith's life was one of many-sided activities. He was always good "Copy," and every so often the newspaper men of the country could rely on him for an interesting story. Two or three years ago he was in London, and started out on the work of rediscovering the London of Dickens and the London of Thackeray. In a taxicab he went about the city making sketches. This attracted much attention, and led to his having trouble with an English policeman, who finally insisted on taking him to a police station as a suspicious person. If the over-zealous

who, like Babcock of Tom Grogan, “had built the sea-wall at Stapleton, Staten Island, for the Lighthouse Department, and constructed the foundation for the Statue of Liberty, and the Race Rock Lighthouse at New London. Elsewhere, in clubs in New York City, and Philadelphia, and in Cincinnati; in London, Paris, and Venice; in Dortrecht, Chartres and Bruges, there was an F. Hopkinson Smith, widely known for his achievements as etcher, water colourist, lecturer and man of letters. This was the Smith of the old Tile, Club, its mellow fellowship and its journeys, its journeys, afield and afloat; the Smith of "The One that Whistler Drew," "Pump Court" and countless other charming etchings; the genial chronicler of Caleb West, Tom Grogan, The Fortunes of Oliver Horn, Peter, The Tides of Barnegat, and of Colonel Carter of Cartersville.

Perhaps it was as a writer that F. H. Smith was known to most people. Yet he never wrote anything for publication until after he was forty-five years of age, whereas he had drawn and painted from his boyhood. While he was still a schoolboy he received for a time the advice and criticism of an old artist named Miller, who lived in Baltimore. That was all the art instruction he ever had, and he was practically self-taught. All the time he was working at engineering he kept in close touch with the art world and worked in charcoal, and now and then took a day off to make some watercolour sketches. The engineering came in another way. Born in Baltimore,

October 23, 1838, he began life as a clerk in a hardware store at fifty dollars a year. He had been destined for Princeton,

where later he sent his son, F. Berkeley Smith, but his father suffered business reverses, and the idea of a college course had to be abandoned. After two years of clerking he became assistant superintendent in his brother's iron foundry, but the Civil War broke out, and the business was closed. From Baltimore he went to New York, and

there, after many disappointments, found a position in an iron business in Broad Street. At the age of twenty-five he made up his mind to become an engineer.

In business for himself, Mr. Smith's first great contract was the construction of the stone ice-breaker about the Bridgeport Lighthouse. Then he built the breakwaters about Block Island, the jetties at the mouth of the Connecticut River and the old sea-wall round Governor's Island in New York Harbour. Meanwhile he was exhibiting his pictures and lecturing on art subjects. Writing came by chance. A number of his water colours were to be brought out in book form. The publisher thought the volume would be better with some descriptive text, and suggested that Mr. Smith write it. The artist demurred, but finally consented to try his hand. The result was Well-Worn Roads, and Mr. Smith had found another profession. In that profession he decided to create a character. Southern by birth and tradition, Southern in all his sympathies, despite his life in the North, his hero was to be a gentleman of the old South, lovable, generous, childishly unpractical, with business New York as a foil. A home for his wanderer was found in the little frame house (the headquarters of the old Tile Club) in the rear of the Maitland Armstrong house in West Tenth Street, with the tall tower of the Jefferson Market Police Court ominously near. Then eight drafts were made with a lead pencil on a yellow paper pad, and with the final draft the first chapter of Colonel Carter of Cartersville came into being.

In the daily papers of March 25th there appeared a news story telling how Morgan Robertson, the Morgan writer of sea stories, had Robertson been found dead leaning against a bureau in a hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Just a year before, almost to a day, there had been printed in the Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia an article entitled "Gathering

No Moss," which told with pathetic detail all the complications, the ennuis, the disappointments, and heartaches of the writer's life. So effective was the article in its tragic simplicity that it brought responses from all parts of the country. Here was a man reduced almost to penury, not because he lacked either talent or industry, but through a congenital inability to retain what he had won. The case was so clear, it recalled so pitiably the traditions of the Grub Street of other days. "Can't you do something?" wrote one novelist very near the apex among contemporary American storytellers. "It wouldn't be a pity if he weren't the real thing; readers are missing something. It isn't sensible that he should be left out." Something was done, and it is pleasant to recall that the last twelve months of his life were far happier in reward and recognition than the preceding years had been. But want and physical suffering had exacted their toll. The respite was only a respite.

The Bohemia which Morgan Robertson knew and in which he suffered was not confined to city attics. It was a Bohemia of far horizons. With that Bohemia he threw in his lot when, as a lad of sixteen, he ran away to sea, fired by an ambition to be first mate. His father was a captain on the Great Lakes, but he had wished his son to follow the career of a landsman. But Morgan's mind was made up, and, leaving his home in New York State, he found his way to the seacoast and shipped as cabin-boy and general fag, doing his own and every one else's work at the gentle urging of fists and belaying pins. Twice round the world he sailed, shipping with all sorts of crafts, from sailing vessels to transatlantic liners, until his early ambition to become first mate was finally realised. During that period he had most of the adventures which befel his heroes. Sometimes he was half-starved, and more than once he had hair-breadth escapes from death; while his exploits fighting bullies would make reading more interesting than polite. Once he went ashore,

disgusted with seafaring, and became a cowboy on the plains. Then he drifted to sea again, and for a time was skipper of a millionaire's yacht. Once he taught young ladies how to swim, and once he even thought he was an Anarchist. But nobody believed him.

By this time Morgan Robertson's illusions were all gone. The futureless life of the sailor appealed less and less to him. One day he rolled into the office of a phrenologist to have his "bumps" read. The phrenologist said he was "constructive," and urged him to learn a trade. The sailor looked about him, and decided to become a watchmaker. When he learned that he could wear a white shirt all day while at work he apprenticed himself on the spot. The ambition to be first mate transformed itself into a dogged determination to become an expert artisan. The watchmaker's apprentice became a diamond and pearl setter, earning expert's wages. When, from constant chiselling of bright metals, his eyes gave out, he turned to writing, and almost instinctively to the sea for inspiration. His first effort, how ever, was a poem, now dead, for which he cherished an unusual tenderness. Then grimly he settled down to the construction of his tales of life in strange But at first success was slow in

scenes.

coming.

Once, during his darkest days of pub lisher hunting, after one of his best stories had been returned with regret, Robertson went in despair to his old "shop" in the diamond district of New York City to ask for work. An order had come in that needed the finest and most delicate workmanship-a necklace of diamonds. The writer took the little packet of diamonds and tramped home with them, as he had tramped down to the shop for reasons of economy. Weary and worn, his brain seething with the adventures of that other struggle whose story, "The Survival of the Fittest," he afterward wrote, the dimeyed artisan set to work. All night he