Church.  The number is 21.  Clemens went to live there in the autumn of 1904, remaining for a time at the near-by Grosvenor while the new habitation was being put in order, and the home furniture that had been brought from Hartford was being installed.  When No. 21 was ready for occupation, only Clemens and his daughter Jean went to live there, for Clara had not recovered from the strain of her mother’s long illness, and the shock of her death, and was in retirement under the care of a trained nurse.  Clemens, according to his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, was lonely in No. 21, and sought to liven matters by installing a great AEolian Orchestrelle.  In January, 1906, Paine paid his first visit to the house and found the great man propped up in bed, with his head at the foot, turning over the pages of “Huckleberry Finn” in search of a paragraph about which some random correspondent had asked explanation.

But to go back long before Clemens’s time, and to begin in the neighbourhood of the old square.  In the days when Fifth Avenue was young Poe must have found his way there, accompanied, perhaps, by the pale, invalided Virginia, to gaze at the fine new houses, for only a few hundred yards away was his last city residence, where Lowell called and found his host “not himself that day,” and where were penned “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” the “Philosophy of Composition,” and “The Literati of New York.”  Then there was the house in Waverly Place, the home of Anne Lynch, the poet of “The Battle of Life,” which was a kind of literary salon of its day, where Poe once read aloud the newly published “Raven,” and where Bayard Taylor visited, and Taylor’s friend Caroline Kirkland, and Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Child, and Ann S. Stephens, who wrote “Fashion and Famine” and “Mary Derwent,” and young Richard Henry Stoddard, and Elizabeth Barstow, who became his wife.  Not far from the Lynch house was the humble dwelling in which Poe wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Just off the Square, at 21 Washington Place, Henry Jones was born.  In a house that once stood at the northwest corner Bayard Taylor lived for a time and wrote the “Epistle from Mount Tmolus,” and some of the “Poems of the Orient.”  In later days a large apartment house grew up on the site, and there George Parsons Lathrop dwelt, and penned some of the verse of his “Days and Dreams,” while his wife, the daughter of the author of “The Scarlet Letter,” composed portions of “Along the Shore.”  In the old University building on the east side of the Square Theodore Winthrop—­later as Colonel Winthrop to meet a soldier’s death at Big Bethel—­wrote “John Brent,” and the famous but utterly dreary “Cecil Dreeme,” and a few doors below is the red brick apartment where in more modern days so many of the younger scribblers have toiled in the years of their pseudo-Bohemia.  Across the Square N.P.  Willis, the town’s crack descriptive writer, was in the habit of making his way, and on one occasion with sorry results.  The actor, Edwin Forrest, appeared in his path and fell upon him with vigorous assault.  Bystanders were on the point of intervening.  “Stand back, gentlemen!” cried the Thespian.  “He has interfered in my domestic affairs.”  And he proceeded with the whacking.