[Illustration: GROVE COURT] Some day the Thomas Paine Association will probably buy it, undertake the long-forgotten national obligation, and prevent it from crumbling to dust as long as ever they can.
The caretaker keeps pets--cats and kittens and dogs and puppies.

Once he kept pigeons too, but the authorities disapproved, he told me.
"Ah, well," I said, "the authorities never have approved of things in this house." He thought me quite mad.
Let us walk down the street toward that delicious splash of green--like a verdant spray thrown up from some unseen river of trees.
There is, in reality, no river of trees; it is only Christopher Street Triangle, elbowing Sheridan Square.

Subway construction is going on around us, but there clings still an old-world feeling.

Ah, here we are--59 Grove Street.

It is a modest but a charming little red-brick house with a brass knocker and an air of unpretentious, small-scale prosperity.