The novelist wrote of the locality as having "a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city"; and ascribed to it, "a richer, riper look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare--the look of having had something of a social history." That "richer, riper look," that suggestion of a past, is there to-day, and is likely to be there tomorrow.

The particular Sloper house is quite easy of identification.

It is the third from the corner as one goes westward from the Avenue.

In 1835, when Dr.Sloper first took possession, moving uptown from the neighbourhood of the City Hall, which had seen its best days socially, the Square, then the ideal of quiet and genteel retirement, was enclosed by a wooden paling.

The edifice in which the Slopers lived and its neighbours were then thought to embody the last results of architectural science.