Since the reversal of fortune which overwhelmed Mr. Stedman five years ago, this charming home has been temporarily leased. The family, however, were altogether fortunate in securing Bayard Taylor’s old home in East Thirtieth Street, during an absence in Europe of the latter’s wife and daughter. Here the conditions surrounding Stedman’s home life have been necessarily changed. The arduous literary labor attendant on the publishing of his recently completed volume on the “Poets of America,” which completes the series of contemporaneous English and American poets, together with his work on the “Library of American Literature” (of which he and Miss Hutchinson are the joint editors), the writing of magazine articles, poems and critiques, and the increased cares of his business struggles, make him too hard-worked a man to be available for the lighter social pleasures. The Sunday evenings are, however, still maintained, as his one leisure hour, and the hospitality is as generous as the present modest resources of the household will permit. Mr. Stedman’s early career, and the native toughness of fibre which has enabled him to fight a winning battle against tremendous odds during his whole life, furnished him with the fortitude and endurance with which he met his recent calamity. The heroic element is a dominant note in his character. At the very outset of his career he gave proof of the stuff that was in him. Entering Yale College in 1849, and suspended in ’53 for certain boyish irregularities, the man in him was born in a day. At nineteen he went into journalism, married at twenty, and in another year was an editor and a father. Ten years later, after service in all the grades of newspaper life, the same energy of decision marked his next departure. He gave up journalism, and went into active business in Wall Street that he might have time for more independent, imaginative writing. The bread-winning was so successful that in another ten years he had gained a competence, and was about to retire from business, to devote himself entirely to literary pursuits. He now returns to the struggle with fortune with the old unworn, undaunted patience. He has been sustained in the vicissitudes of his career by the cheering companionship of his wife. Ever in sympathy with her husband’s work and ambitions, Mrs. Stedman has possessed the gift of adaptability which has enabled her to meet with befitting ease and dignity the varying fortunes which have befallen them. In the earlier nomadic days she was the Blanche, who, with the poet, rambled through the “faery realm” of Bohemia. The “little King Arthur” is a grown man now, his father’s co-worker and devoted aid. The king has abdicated in favor of a tiny princess, who rules the household with her baby ways. This is another Laura, _ætat_ four, who, with her mother, Mrs. Frederick Stedman, completes the family circle. It needs the reiterated calls for grandpa