Ik Marvel's "Reveries of a Bachelor" was of that _genre_--and how the hearth logs blazed and the fair faces flickered in the flames in those pages of Mr.
Donald G.Mitchell!--and George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"; and the latter book was one of the first in which was to be found the flavour of the old Fifth Avenue.

Then there were the forgotten novelists of the seventies and early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House.

All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period.

There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago.
That was the late Archibald Clavering Gunter.

The present generation knows him and his works not at all; but how a past generation used to read and reread "Mr.Barnes of New York," and "Mr.Potter of Texas," and "Miss Nobody of Nowhere," and "That Frenchman," which should have been called "M.