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 "Vignettes of Manhattan" pointed out of one of its windows and confessed that, failure in life as he was, he would die out of sight of the tower of the Madison Square Garden.

A reminiscent sign or two is all that is left of the old Hotel Brunswick, which, among the hostelries of other days, yielded precedence only to the Fifth Avenue and the Brevoort as a factor in fiction.
Reverting to Mr.Davis, the Tower was one of the staple subjects of conversation of his heroes and heroines when they happened to be in the Congo, or Morocco, or looking longingly from the decks of steamers in South American waters; and the shadowy personage--very probably Van Bibber--who took "A Walk up the Avenue" started on his journey from the Square.