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On the morning of July 11, 1804, he rode forth to face the pistol of an adversary, and in the wooded glade at Weehawken Aaron Burr's bullet laid him low. A few hours later friends brought him, desperately wounded, to a house in Greenwich village, where he died the next day. He is buried in Trinity church-yard.

The old house is a square two-story structure, with a basement, plainly built of deal boards, and painted an olive green. There are verandas for the first story on the east and west sides, and at the rear a long flight of steps runs down sidewise from the rear porch. The main entrance is fronted by a roomy porch, where Mrs. Hamilton, the daughter of General Philip Schuyler, used to wait for her husband, when in the warm summer afternoons he came galloping up the King's Road from his office in the distant town, and where they sat together on pleasant evenings, and perhaps watched the growth of the thirteen gum-trees Hamilton had planted in honor of the thirteen original States. These trees are still standing, a little to the southeast of the first site of the house, while other trees stud the lawn, and a ragged border of box, showing the growth of years, runs along the abandoned carriage drive. The front door of the house opens into a small hallway, and to the right is a spacious room used by Hamilton as a library and study. Adjoining it, also on the right, is the dining-room, low-studded, octagonal in shape, and having a bay-window at the east. The wood-work, the white marble mantel, and the fireplace are severe in irony of human hopes and ambitions.

Three Presidents of the republic have lived and two have died in New York. The house at 123 Lexington Avenue was once the home of Chester A. Arthur, and it was there that he died; and an old-fashioned, Dutch-roofed structure, yet standing at the corner of Prince and Marion Streets, was the last residence of James Monroe. After the death of his wife, in 1830, ex-President Monroe removed to New York and lived with his son-in-law, Samuel L. Gouveneur, once postmaster of the city, at 63 Prince Street, then a fashionable thoroughfare. He was in feeble health when he came, and died on July 4, 1831. His body rested in the Marble Cemetery in East Second Street for twenty-seven years; but in 1858 it was disinterred at the request of the State of Virginia, and removed to Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, where it now lies. The Prince Street house shows signs of age and neglect. It stands amid squalid surroundings, and now does duty as a Hungarian restaurant.

In the house at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street General Grant passed the most heroic period of his life. The house was bought by friends of the general and presented to Mrs. Grant soon after their return from Europe in 1879. Here the long illness that ended at Mount McGregor came upon him, and here, battling grimly with death, he wrote his memoirs, in order that his wife and children might not want after he was gone. It was the greatest battle of his life, and the picture of the hero who had earned and worn the highest earthly honors working amid the miseries of a sick-chamber to glean the gains he knew he could never enjoy, is one to which history offers no parallel. He won in this race with death, and finished his task a few days before the end came.

An apartment-house has replaced the old home of General Scott at 136 West Twentieth Street, but the house in which Admiral Farragut lived for several years, and in which he died in September, 1870, is still standing, at 113 East Thirty-sixth Street. The same is true of the house in which Horace Greeley erstwhile lived at 35 East Nineteenth Street. This is a three-story brick building, now devoted to business purposes. Here the founder of the Tribune and his daughters dwelt for many years, and in an upper room in this house he wrote his "History of the American Conflict" and did other notable work. The house at 10 Washington Place, in which Commodore Vanderbilt lived a score of years, and in which he died, was replaced a few years ago by a warehouse, and a similar fate has befallen the last home of the first John Jacob Astor, at 37 Lafayette Place. In Depau Row, in West Bleeker Street, stood until recently a dilapidated house in which Alexander T. Stewart lived for many years, before he built the marble pile which is now the home of the Manhattan Club. The old house of Peter Cooper is still standing, at the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Fourth Avenue. It stood, when first built, on the present site of Cooper Institute. William M. Tweed, in the early days of his remarkable career, lived at 197 Henry Street, moving from there to 511 Fifth Avenue, from which he made his sensational escape. An earlier home of Tweed was 193 Madison Street.

The brownstone house at 5 West Twenty-second Street was for a long time the city home of Samuel F. B. Morse. Here he lived for many years after the invention of the telegraph brought him wealth and fame, and here he died on April 2, 1872. A modest house at 36 Beach Street was for nearly forty years the home of John Ericsson, and in this house the great engineer breathed his last March 8, 1889. Here the "Monitor" and many other famous inventions were designed and perfected. The house is now used as an industrial school, where the children of emigrants are given a training that in future years will make them useful and patriotic citizens,--a fitting and worthy mission for the old home of one of the greatest of the adopted sons of the republic.

The house at 173 Houston Street, long owned and occupied by William E. Burton, has given way to a business structure, and tenement-houses have replaced the early homes of Lester and James W. Wallack at 12½ and 151 Crosby Street. However, the house at 436 West Twenty-second Street, in which Edwin Forrest once lived, stands very much as he left it, even as to its interior and furniture. In this house the tragedian and his beautiful English wife, Catherine Sinclair, dwelt for several years, holding receptions at which William Cullen Bryant, Parke Goodwin, Nathaniel P. Willis, and other notable men were frequent guests; and here occurred the sudden, mysterious quarrel, of which no one has ever been able to discover the real cause, and which ended in the divorce suit that helped to make the fame of Charles O'Conor. It is a wide-front dwelling of brick, two stories and a basement, with a mansard roof that is really a third story. The entrance is by a broad stone staircase, set near the centre of the front. When Forrest bought the property it had a big garden in the rear, which is still there, fenced about with ornamental walls of wood, decked in these later days with a profusion of trailing vines and greenery. Tradition has it that the actor bought the place of a wealthy Englishman, who built it seventy years ago as the exact counterpart of the English home of his wife, designing thus to cure the homesickness to which the latter had fallen a victim.

It has been the home for many years past of a wealthy retired merchant, who, with a love for bric-à-brac and ample means for its gratification, has gather there one of the choice art collections of the town, and made it a storehouse literally overflowing with things as costly and curious as they are beautiful. Every inch of wall in the house is covered with art ornaments, and the old-fashioned spiral staircase, so often referred to by witnesses in the famous divorce trial, is decked with rugs and other trimmings.

A fortune has been expended on ivory carvings, displayed in cabinets of Louis XV.'s time, and there are rare old bronzes, queer andirons, and costly porcelains. Richly embroidered chairs from the castle at Fontainebleau are grouped around the open fireplace, and the north wall of the reception-parlor is crowded with fine old miniatures. On the eastern wall are two photographs in oval silver frames. They are portraits of Forrest and his wife. The actor's face has an amiable expression not found in his other photographs. The owner spent years in patient search before he secured the photograph of Mrs. Forest, which represents her in her youth, when her beauty of face was famous. Timepieces of bygone times, including both clocks and watches, are hung on the southern wall, over a satin lined case filled with lotus-leaf carvings in ivory.

A noteworthy feature of the dining-room is a tall cabinet, containing a complete dinner service, which Louis Philippe once used at the Tuileries, and which bears the royal crest. Old silver fills other cabinets in the hallway outside, and oil-paintings, antique swords, and ancient armor cover the walls of the spiral stairway from floor to ceiling. When the owner could no longer find room for his treasures in the house itself he went out to the porch and the garden beyond. He put things among the plants and flowers, and filled the porch with armor, lamps, lanterns, panels, wood-carvings, and rare rugs. On this porch Forrest used to sit on summer evenings and sip, in the intervals of pleasant familiar talk, the delicious mint-juleps that his wife brewed for him and his friends, and of which he was very fond. Mint-juleps were then just coming into favor, and Mrs. Forrest had reduced the mixing of them to a fine art. Books are stored on the second floor of the house, where Forrest had his library; and the top story, where the tragedian had his wardrobe and dressing-room, has become a bachelor's den and library, where the present owner's son passes his leisure hours. All in all the old home of Forrest is a curiously beautiful house, made interesting not alone by past associations, but also by the patient zeal and enlightened taste which have wrought its present adornment.

There are few reminders in brick and mortar or wood of the literary New York of earlier days, but among them are the house Washington Irving built for his New York residence, and the Poe cottage at Fordham. The first named stands on the southwest corner of Irving Place and East Seventeenth Street,--a low-browed brick structure, looking as sturdy and strong as any of its more youthful neighbors. It was built for the great writer, and became the centre of a little family settlement, from which Irving Place took its name. It fronts on Irving Place, but can be entered only from Seventeenth Street. Irving would not permit a door and steps in front, for he loved to sit in the big room that in his day occupied the entire ground story of the house and to gaze through ample windows down the hill, at the East River, filled with craft bound to and from the Sound. This was Irving's favorite room. Here he wrote, drank, and sat on long winter evenings before the great fireplace, with his pipe and his thoughts for company. The house had, besides this big room, three sleeping-rooms upstairs, of which the front one was the author's, and in the basement a tiny kitchen and a good-sized dining-room. Before the front windows on Irving Place hangs an iron balcony, and this, on those rare summer evenings when he was in New York, was his favorite seat. Most of the pleasant summer days he passed, even while New York was his main place of residence, along the shores of the Hudson or in the Catskills. His occupancy of the house ended not long after his return from Spain, where he had filled the post of American minister; but the building remained the property of the Irving family for many years.

A few minutes' walk from the railroad station at Fordham, forty years ago a quiet country village, but now fast becoming a part of the Greater New York, stands the cottage in which Edgar Allan Poe passed the last and beyond doubt the most peaceful years of his feverish life. It is a simple affair, built more than seventy years ago, long, low, and box-shaped. The sides, as well as the roof, are shingled. A broad porch shades the entrance, and near by grows a vigorous cherry-tree planted by Poe in 1847, and which rarely fails to bring out a full crop of fruit. On the lower floor of the cottage there are two large square rooms and a kitchen. The middle room was used by Poe as a dining- and sitting-room, and here he received his visitors, until his wife became ill. She then occupied the front room as a bedroom, and it was there she died. The second floor has three low-ceilinged rooms, and the front room, which was the same size as the one below, was, it is said, Poe's favorite room. An old-fashioned brick chimney runs up through the roof, and has an open fireplace, where a cheerful fire can blaze and crackle in winter. In this room "Ullalume" and "Eureka," two of his best-known poems, were written. Poe rented the cottage in the spring of 1846, and went with his wife and her mother, Mrs. Clemm, to live there. His wife, Virginia, was then suffering from consumption. She rallied for a time, but soon again began to fail, and died in the following year. The grounds about the cottage comprise about two acres, and slope away into a grassy, shady hollow. A ledge of rocks overlooks the cliff and the valley below. To the east the view stretches into Connecticut, and over the Sound to the hills of Long Island, blue and shadowy in the distance. Here Poe spent the quietest and happiest days of his life. His expenses were small, and his duties only such as he cared to assume. He took long walks, often going to the city on foot, and his labors were lightened by visits from friends and admirers. But the end came all too soon. A few months after the death of his wife Poe set out on his fatal trip to Baltimore, and a fortnight later silence had fallen upon one of the strangest geniuses of his time.

One other interesting reminder of the New York of other days calls for closing mention. Audubon, the ornithologist, after an adventurous career that had led him over half the world, in 1841, at the age of sixty, bought the property now known as Audubon Park. It consisted of forty-four acres, all heavily wooded, and at that time was almost as remote from the city as a lodge in the Catskills. Here he built his house, his nearest neighbor being Madame Jumel. The naturalist took with him a colony of workmen,--carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons,--and houses were built in the woods for their shelter while the manor-house went up. Fifty years ago the journey to New York was by no means an easy one, and Audubon raised his own vegetables, and at one time killed his own meat. The Audubon mansion was the scene of the final triumph of S. F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. In 1843, when Morse was setting up his first line of telegraph between Philadelphia and New York, its New Jersey terminus was at Fort Lee, opposite Audubon Park. The wire and instruments were carried across the river in a row-boat, and the instrument set up in the laundry of the mansion. From this old room, in which there has been no change in half a century, the first telegraph message ever sent from Manhattan Island was flashed across the wire to Philadelphia, recording the success of the experiment. It was sent in the presence of Morse, Audubon, and the latter's family. Between 1843 and 1845 Audubon was absent in the West. Soon after his return from this trip his health gave way, he being first afflicted with a loss of memory. He spent hours in endeavoring to paint, and would burst into tears to find that his efforts were in vain. He had broken his right arm in his youth by a fall from a horse, and had taught himself to paint equally well with either hand, but in this strait both hands had lost their cunning. In 1847 his bedchamber was moved downstairs, adjoining his old painting-room, and there he died, in February, 1851.

The old house has been much changed since it passed from the possession of the Audubon family in 1864. A mansard-roof has been added, and bow-windows extended from the front and rear sides. The basement, however, and the first floor have been little altered since the house was built, and standing, as it does, well out of the beaten tracks of trade and travel, it serves to add zest and pleasure to the quest of any searcher after brick-and-mortar reminders of old New York.