Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

The Table of Contents for this book refers to it as Volume II. The Title Page and List of Illustrations refer to it as Volume III.

The Table of Contents for this volume refers to chapters ultimately published in a subsequent volume. Those chapter listings are retained, but the page number links are not active.

A Cowboy

AMERICA

EDITION ARTISTIQUE

The World's Famous
Places and Peoples

AMERICA

BY
JOEL COOK

In Six Volumes
Volume III.

MERRILL AND BAKER
New York London

THIS EDITION ARTISTIQUE OF THE WORLD'S
FAMOUS PLACES AND PEOPLES IS LIMITED
TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED
COPIES, OF WHICH THIS COPY IS
NO. ____

Copyright, Henry T. Coates & Co., 1900

CONTENTS

Volume II

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME III

AROUND THE HARBOR OF NEW YORK.

AMERICA,
PICTURESQUE AND DESCRIPTIVE.

VIII.

AROUND THE HARBOR OF NEW YORK.

Hendrick Hudson—The Ship "Half Moon"—Manhattan Island—New Amsterdam—Hudson River—Fire Island—Navesink Highlands—Sandy Hook—Liberty Statue—Governor's Island—Jersey City—Hoboken—Weehawken—The Kills—Perth Amboy—Staten Island—New Dorp—Commodore Vanderbilt—Hackensack River—Passaic River—Paterson—Newark—Elizabeth—Rahway—Raritan River—New Brunswick—Battle of Monmouth—Molly Pitcher—Greater New York—Battery Park—Bowling Green—Broadway—Trinity Church—Famous and Sky-Scraping Buildings—Wall Street—National City Bank—St. Paul's Church—City Hall Park—Chemical Bank—Dry Goods District—Cooper Institute—Peter Stuyvesant—Union Square—Tammany Hall—Madison Square—Fifth Avenue—Washington Square—Little Church Around the Corner—Murray Hill—John Jacob Astor—Alexander T. Stewart—Fifth Avenue Architecture—The Vanderbilts—New York Public Library—Famous Churches—Jay Gould—Metropolitan Museum—Central Park—Museum of Natural History—Morningside Park—Riverside Park—Spuyten Duyvel Creek—Battle of Harlem Heights—Fort Washington—Morrisania—Croton Aqueducts—High Bridge—The Bronx—Van Cortlandt Park—Bronx Park—Pelham Bay Park—Hunter's Island—East River and its Islands—Hell Gate—Brooklyn Bridge—City of Churches—Brooklyn Development—Fulton Street—Brooklyn Heights—Plymouth Church—The Beecher Family—Church of the Pilgrims—Pratt Institute—Greenwood Cemetery—Its Famous Tombs—Ocean Parkway—Prospect Park—Coney Island—Its Constant Festival—Brighton and Manhattan Beaches—View from the Observatory.

HENDRICK HUDSON.

The redoubtable navigator for the Dutch East India Company, Hendrick Hudson, after exploring Delaware Bay, sailed along the New Jersey coast and entered Sandy Hook, discovering, on September 11, 1609, the Hudson River. There is a vague tradition that the first European who saw the magnificent harbor of New York was the Florentine, Verrazani, who came as early as 1524. Hudson was searching for the "Northwest Passage," and when he steered his little ship, the "Half Moon," into the great river, with its swelling tide of salt water, was sure he had found the long-sought route to the Indies. He explored it as far up as the present site of Albany, creating a sensation among the Indians, who flocked to the shores to see the "great white bird," as they called the "Half Moon," because of its wide-spreading sails. He traded with them for tobacco and furs, finding the Lenni Lenapes on the western bank and the Mohicans on the eastern side, and to impress them with his prowess, put them in a great fright by shooting off his cannon. Upon returning from Albany, the Indians gave him a feast on an island, breaking their arrows in token that they meant no treachery. Hudson had a goodly store of seductive "schnapps," and offered them some in return for their hospitality. They examined it closely, smelt it, but passed it along without tasting. Finally one, somewhat bolder, partook, and drinking a good deal, fell in a drunken stupor for several hours. When finally aroused he said the Dutchmen had the strongest water he had ever tasted, and the other Indians then became eager to try the fire-water too, and soon they were all under its influence, and thus became firm friends of the Dutch.

The scene of this great carousal is said to have been the island where is now the city of New York. The Indian word Man-a-tey means "the island," and from this they named the place Man-a-hat-ta-nink, the "island of general intoxication." Ticknor, in his guide-book, gravely tells us that "from the scene of wassail and merriment which followed the meeting of the sailors and the Indians, the latter called the island Manhattan, "the place where they all got drunk." Thus, at the beginning, this noted locality acquired a reputation which many attest as existing with undiminished lustre in maturer years. By way of variety in this connection, it may be related that Washington Irving, in Knickerbocker's veritable history of New York, has this to say: "The name most current at the present day, and which is likewise countenanced by the great historian Vander-Donck, is Manhattan, which is said to have originated in a custom among the squaws, in the early settlement, of wearing men's hats, as is still done among many tribes. 'Hence,' as we are told by an old Governor, who was somewhat of a wag, and flourished almost a century since, and had paid a visit to the wits of Philadelphia, 'hence arose the appellation of man-hat-on, first given to the Indians, and afterwards to the island'—a stupid joke, but well enough for a Governor." Irving continues: "There is another, founded on still more ancient and indisputable authority, which I particularly delight in, seeing it is at once poetical, melodious and significant, and this is recorded in the before-mentioned voyage of the great Hudson, written by Master Juet, who clearly and correctly calls it Manna-hatta, that is to say, the island of Manna, or, in other words, 'a land flowing with milk and honey.'"

NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS HARBOR.

About five years elapsed after Hudson's discovery before a colony was firmly fixed on Manhattan Island, which, when fairly started in 1614, was a little palisade fort and four small log houses. The Dutch called their possessions the Niew Netherlands, named the colony Nieu Amsterdam, and the land across the East River was known as Nassau, the earliest name of Long Island. Hudson was so impressed with the Highlands and the Catskills, which he passed in exploring the river, that he named it the "River of the Mountains," but this was changed by the Dutch to Mauritius, in honor of Prince Maurice of Nassau. The Indians along the banks called the river Shatemuc and Cahohatatea. The English, shortly after the discovery, began calling it the Hudson River, but later, it was generally styled the North River to distinguish it from the Delaware or South River; and North River is the name now generally used in New York. The Manhattan colony was of slow growth, and the first Dutch Governor sent out was a Westphalian, Peter Minuit, a thrifty old fellow, who, by again making good use of "schnapps," bought the whole of Manhattan Island in 1626 from the Indians for beads and trinkets valued at sixty guilders, about $25. There were a thousand people there in 1644, making the original Dutch aristocracy of the "Knickerbockers," this name being adapted later from Irving, and they impressed their peculiarities upon the early city; but their descendants have largely given place to a newer aristocracy of wealth and an army of immigrants from all races. The last Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, arrived in 1647, and for protection the colonists had then built a fence across the island along what is now the line of Wall Street. An Indian scare a few years later caused this to be replaced with a wall of cedar palisades, and it ultimately developed into the city wall. Thus enclosed, the Mayor of New Amsterdam was required to walk around the walls every morning at sunrise, unlock the gates and give the keys to the commander of the fort down at the Battery. When the Duke of York's English expedition came over in 1664 and overturned the government of old Stuyvesant, surnamed "Peter the Headstrong," and his Knickerbockers, at the same time changing the city's name to New York, it had three hundred and eighty-four houses, and in 1700 the population had increased to about six thousand. The first English Governor was Sir Edmund Andros.

The remote sources of the Hudson River are in Hamilton and Essex Counties, in the Adirondacks, in northeastern New York State, the highest at four thousand feet elevation above the sea, the head streams being outlets for a large number of highland lakes. The river flows over three hundred miles to the sea, and has few tributaries, the largest being the Hoosac and the Mohawk. Its lower course is a long tidal estuary, the tidal head being at Troy, from whence the fall in level to the ocean is only about five feet. The estuary below Manhattan Island expands into the noble New York harbor, enclosed between Long Island on the east and Staten Island on the west, the latter being the Indian Aquehonga, meaning the "high sandy banks." The harbor entrance from the sea, at Sandy Hook, is eighteen miles below the city. Inside Sandy Hook is the lower bay, of triangular form, extending nine to twelve miles on each side, the Narrows, a deep channel about a mile wide at the northeastern angle, opening into the upper bay, which is an irregular oval, about eight by five miles. This extends northward into the Hudson River, westward into Newark Bay, and has the tidal strait of East River leading north to Long Island Sound, on the eastern side of Manhattan. Within the bays and rivers around New York there are over a hundred miles of available anchorage ground, and the Government is now making a channel to the sea through Sandy Hook bar, forty feet deep at low water.

ENTERING NEW YORK HARBOR.

The approach from the sea to Sandy Hook is first guided for the modern navigator by the flashing white light on Fire Island, a low sand-strip on the Long Island Coast; and then there rise in front the Highlands of the Navesink, on the Jersey Coast south of Sandy Hook, with a pair of twin lighthouses perched upon their green slopes. The Hook, a long strip of yellow sand enclosing the harbor, also has another lighthouse on its northern end. Here are the expanding works of a formidable fort defending the harbor entrance, and an artillery trial and proving ground. Behind the Navesink Highlands and the Hook, the Jersey shore of the lower bay stretches far back westward into Raritan Bay, thrust up into the land between New Jersey and Staten Island. The green hills of this island, crowned with villas, make the northwestern boundary of the bay. To the right hand of the Hook, and north of the entrance, is the sand strip of Coney Island, with its stretch of hotels and buildings, the popular seashore resort of New York. Within the Hook is the lower Quarantine on the west bank of Romer Shoal, and over opposite is Gravesend Bay, behind Coney Island. The Narrows, where the Hudson has forced an outlet through a broken-down mountain range, is partly obstructed by an island reef of rocks. The hill-slopes, together with the island, are fortified, Forts Hamilton and Tompkins being on either hand, named after Alexander Hamilton and Daniel D. Tompkins, the latter having been a Governor of New York and Vice-President of the United States. On the island is the little red sandstone Fort Lafayette, where many famous political prisoners were confined during the Civil War. Within the Narrows the upper bay spreads out, the high Staten Island hills, covered with noble mansions, rising on the left hand, while on the right are the hamlets on the lower shores of Long Island, with the distant tombs of Greenwood Cemetery behind. The villages of Clifton and Stapleton and the Quarantine Station are on Staten Island, Stapleton being the yachting headquarters. Bedloe's and Ellis's Islands are passed, the latter being the landing-place of arriving emigrants, while on the former, now called Liberty Island, is the colossal Liberty Statue presented to the United States by France in commemoration of the Centenary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876. This statue, designed by Bartholdi and erected ten years later, is a female figure holding aloft a torch—"Liberty enlightening the world." It is made of copper and iron, and weighs two hundred and twenty-five tons. The statue is one hundred and fifty-one feet high, and stands on a granite pedestal one hundred and fifty-five feet high.

Over on the western side, behind these small islands, the Jersey shore recedes, and the strait making the boundary of Staten Island, which the Dutch named the Kill von Kull, stretches around behind that island to Arthur Kill and sundry railway coal-shipping ports on its banks, where the great coal roads come out from the Pennsylvania mines. Just in the entrance to East River is Governor's Island, with an old-fashioned circular stone fort, called Castle William, and the more modern defensive work, Fort Columbus. On Governor's Island is the United States Army headquarters. This old Castle William, with another very similar circular fort, then called Castle Clinton, on the Battery at the lower end of Manhattan Island, were the defensive works of New York in the eighteenth century. Castle Clinton is now an aquarium. Red Hook, the jutting point of Brooklyn, is opposite Governor's Island, and above it the East River opens, the strait flowing between New York and Brooklyn, and connecting the harbor with Long Island Sound, twenty miles distant, beyond the famous "Hell Gate," once the terror of the mariner, but since improved by costly rock excavations which have made a deep and safe channel. Through the East River and Hell Gate flows the greater part of the Hudson River tidal current. Both the East and North Rivers are lined on either side for miles by piers crowded with shipping, and the tall towers and ponderous cables of the Brooklyn Bridge rise high above the East River, while behind the foliage-covered Battery Park stretches the metropolis, with its many huge buildings.

JERSEY CITY AND STATEN ISLAND.

Communipaw, the lower end of Jersey City, is opposite the Battery, and above it the Jersey City front on the Hudson River is occupied for miles by railway terminals, making a succession of piers, ferry-houses and grain elevators. Originally Jersey City was the sandy peninsula of Paulus Hook, a tongue of flat farming land stretching down between the Hudson River and Newark Bay. The termination of this peninsula is Communipaw, long a sleepy village, originally granted to a Dutch West India Company Director—Michael Pauw. He was proud of this domain, of which he was the patroon, so he called it Pavonia or Communipauw, the "Commune of Pauw." His Dutch garrison massacred the Indians in the neighborhood, and soon afterwards, in retaliation, they exterminated all the Dutch but one family. At Jersey City there come out to the Hudson River all the great Trunk Line railways from the West, with the single exception of the New York Central Railroad. In the Revolution, the site of the present Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal Station was a British fortification, which was partly stormed and captured, with a number of prisoners, in 1779, by Major Henry Lee. Jersey City is entirely a growth of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which it had a population of only thirteen persons, living in a single house. It now has two hundred and fifty thousand, and is replete with important manufacturing establishments, its expansion having come from the overflow of New York and the wonderful development of its railway system. While spreading over much surface, yet it presents little attraction beyond the enormous railway terminals and factories. The traveller rarely stops there, but rushes through to get into or out of New York. To the northward is Hoboken, with sixty thousand people, including many Germans, and it has large silk factories. Here, in strange contrast with the commercial aspect of everything around, the river front rises in a bluff shore, crowned by a grove of trees and running up into a low mound, whereon is the "Stevens Castle." This was the home of Edwin A. Stevens one of the projectors of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. He endowed the Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken, and spent his declining years and much of his railway fortune in building the "Stevens Battery," a noted warship, for New York harbor defense, which he bequeathed his native State of New Jersey, and that Commonwealth shortly afterwards sold it to be broken up for old iron. Beyond is the village of Weehawken, with the Elysian Fields, where Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel of 1804, then a pleasant rural resort, but now largely absorbed by railway terminals. This duel arose from political quarrels, and at the first fire Hamilton received a wound from which he died the next day. Behind Jersey City rises the long rocky ridge of Bergen Hill, through which all but one of the railways cut their routes by tunnels or deep fissures, and its outcroppings above Weehawken come forward to the Hudson River bank in the grand escarpment of the Palisades. These remarkable columnar formations of trap rock extend for twenty miles along the western shore of the river, and in part appear to be built up of basalt. To connect the various railways terminating at Jersey City with New York, a tunnel is being constructed under the Hudson River; and two others, and also a gigantic bridge, are projected.

I have already referred to Staten Island, which is the western border of New York harbor, where its pleasant hill-slopes add so much to the scenic beauty. The narrow "Kills," stretching for nearly twenty miles down to Perth Amboy, make its western boundary, separating the island, which is the Borough of Richmond in Greater New York, from New Jersey, to which by right it is said to belong. It covers about sixty square miles, with its diversified hill-slopes rising in some places to an elevation of over four hundred feet, and has probably seventy thousand population. It is shaped something like a leaf, hung, as it were, upon the long projecting peninsula between Newark Bay and New York harbor, the Kill von Kull stretching westward to divide it from this peninsula, which at that part is the town and port of Bayonne, running off into Bergen Point at the lower end of Bergen Hill. It was from Bergen Point that General Washington in 1787 was rowed in a barge to New York, to be inaugurated the first President of the United States. From Elizabethport, on the western side of Newark Bay, the Arthur Kill stretches, a narrow strait, far southward, broadening somewhat into Staten Island Sound, and debouching at Perth Amboy into the western end of Raritan Bay. Perth Amboy was the terminus of the original line of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. It was the capital of the Colonial Province of New Jersey two centuries ago, and its eligible position at the confluence of Staten Island Sound and the Raritan River and Bay, the point of union of the various interior water ways, made it at that early period very ambitious. In fact, "Perthtown, or Ompoge on Ambo" (the Indian name for the point, which meant "round and hollow"), then rivalled New York in commercial importance. Its name came from the Earl of Perth, one of the grantees of lands in East Jersey. Early travellers flocked thither, praising its merits; and even William Penn was persuaded to go over and look at it, oracularly declaring, "I have never seen such before in my life," whatever that might have meant. But New York, with its great harbor, ultimately overshadowed Amboy, and it has since dropped out, even as a way-station on the route between the two leading cities. It has about fifteen thousand inhabitants, and its trade chiefly consists in shipping coal and fire-clay, brought out by the railroads.

The loyal Jerseyman will never forgive New York for having captured Staten Island. After the English came to New York in 1664, under the grant of King Charles II. to the Duke of York of all the country from Canada down to Virginia, the Duke granted to Berkeley and Carteret the portion lying between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. This grant grieved the New Yorkers, for they said it gave away the best lands around their harbor, so they tried to get it all back, and managed to capture Staten Island. Some sharp fellow invented the fiction, on which they resolutely insisted, that the Arthur Kill was really the Hudson River; and, taking possession, they never gave it up. A legal contest was fought for over one hundred and fifty years, and it was not until 1833 that a treaty between the two States declared the Kills to be their boundary. Staten Island is about sixteen miles long, and from its eastern slopes has a noble outlook over the Lower New York Bay towards the ocean. Fine beaches line these coasts, which rise sharply into hills inland, and most of the eligible sites are crowned with villas. It was at Stapleton, on Staten Island, that Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the head of the great family, was born in 1794, and he laid the foundation of his great fortune, at the age of sixteen years, by sailing a ferryboat to New York, six miles away. Upon a plateau in the centre of the island is the village of New Dorp, the original settlement of the Vanderbilts, a farm of about four hundred acres. Here the Commodore came in his youth, and here his son, William H. Vanderbilt, was born and lived for many years, an agricultural laborer for his father. Here also is a little Moravian church they attended, and upon a terraced hill behind it, the highest part of the island, is the spacious gray granite mausoleum, within which rest the two great millionaires, father and son, with some of their children. In the old churchyard are the graves of many other Vanderbilts and their collaterals. At Port Richmond, over on the Kill, the most considerable town on the island, and formerly the county-seat, is the house, now a hotel, in which Aaron Burr died in 1836.

SOME NEW JERSEY TOWNS.

Westward from Bergen Hill and the Palisades are the meadows which stretch down to Newark Bay, and meandering through them to form it are the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers. The name of Hackensack means, in the original Indian dialect, the "lowlands," and it was given by them also to the channel around Bergen Point, by which the waters of Newark Bay reach New York harbor. This river drains the western slopes of the Palisades. Passaic means "the valley," and the name seems to have referred to the country through which that stream flows. The Passaic River, which is ninety miles long, comes from the mountains of Northern New Jersey and flows a tortuous course to Paterson, fifteen miles northwest of Jersey City, where there is an admirable water power which has created a manufacturing town of over one hundred thousand people, having extensive silk and cotton mills and locomotive factories. The river describes a curve, forming the boundary of the city for more than nine miles, on all sides excepting the south, and its rapids and falls descend seventy-two feet, the falls being a most picturesque cataract with fifty feet perpendicular descent. The town was named after Governor William Paterson of New Jersey, who signed its incorporation act July 4, 1792, the manufacturing corporation projecting it having been formed under the auspices of Alexander Hamilton.

The Passaic flows onward past Newark nine miles west of Jersey City, another extensive and prosperous manufacturing city of two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, turning out goods of all kinds with an annual value of over $100,000,000. This city spreads far across the flat surface above Newark Bay and adjoining the Passaic, and to the northward its suburbs run up into the attractive hills of Orange. Market Street is a fine highway through the business section, while a large area is covered by comfortable and handsome residences, among which passes Broad Street, its finest avenue, one hundred and thirty-two feet wide, shaded by majestic trees, bordered with many ornamental buildings, and skirting three attractive parks embowered with elms. Newark is a great iron and steel centre, makes fine jewelry, good carriages and excellent leather, and also brews much lager beer. Yet few would suppose it had a strictly Puritan origin. In 1666, hearing the praises of East Jersey, a body of discontented men of Connecticut, headed by their pastor, Abraham Pierson, journeyed to the Passaic meadows and bought these lands from the Hackensack Indians "for one hundred and thirty pounds, twelve blankets and twelve guns." In early life the pastor had preached at Newark in England, for which he had quite an affection, and he gave the Jersey settlement its name. When Philadelphia was founded, the fame of Newark spread down there as a producer of excellent cider and seductive Jersey apple jack. Its most famous son of modern times was General Phil Kearney.

Five miles beyond Newark the diminutive Elizabeth River flows down to the Kills, and here is the city of Elizabeth, with fifty thousand people, noted as one of the handsomest of the Jersey towns. Like Newark and Paterson, it is really an outlying suburb of New York, providing homes for much of the overflow of population, who rush into the metropolis for business every morning, and back again every evening. Under the name of Elizabethport it spreads down to the Arthur Kill, and over there are most of its factories and extensive coal-shipping piers. The original settlement dates from 1665, when it was named in honor of Lady Elizabeth, wife of Sir George Carteret, one of the grantees of East Jersey. The early inhabitants were largely Puritans, and its chief establishment is the extensive works of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Here was founded the College of New Jersey, afterwards removed to Princeton, and a tablet marking the original site was unveiled in 1897. A few miles beyond, another little river flows down to the Kills, first named after old Rahwack, the Indian sachem whose tribe owned the land thereabouts, and here is another thriving town, Rahway, which is noted for its carriages. At Menlo Park, nearby, the electrical inventor, Thomas A. Edison, sustained by New York capital, toiled for years in seclusion to perfect his discoveries, and developed the germ that has grown to such vast proportions. The "Wizard of Menlo Park" afterwards located his chief laboratory and his home at Newark. Then, crossing what are known as the "Short Hills" westward, past many villages, among them Metuchen, once the domain of Metuching, the Indian "King of the Rolling Land," we come to the Raritan River, thirty-one miles from Jersey City.

Here debouches the Delaware and Raritan Canal at New Brunswick, a city of twenty-five thousand people. The Raritan flows through the red shales and sandstones of Central New Jersey, generally a chocolate-colored stream, and goes off to form Raritan Bay, fifteen miles below. Factories cluster on the New Brunswick lowlands along the river and canal, but there is a handsome town built upon the higher grounds, encircling the lower and older portions like a crescent. The Dutch came here from the Hudson River early in the eighteenth century and found a village which had been started by some fishermen from Long Island. They organized the town, naming it in honor of the Ducal House of Brunswick. Its most prominent feature is Rutgers College, housed in red sandstone buildings upon attractive grounds, alongside the railway, a venerated foundation of the Dutch Reformed Church, originally chartered by King George III. as "Queen's College," but afterwards receiving the name of Rutgers from a benefactor in 1826. It has an important adjunct in the New Jersey Agricultural College. There is also the Dutch Reformed Theological Seminary, the first established in America, and dating from 1771, its main building, also named from its chief benefactor, being Hertzog Hall. An early traveller, visiting New Brunswick in 1748, described it as "a pretty little town with four churches;" and these quaint buildings are still there, the ancient Christ Church being surrounded with the graves of the first settlers. Eighteen miles to the southeast the Revolutionary battle of Monmouth was fought in June, 1778, and a monument commemorates it at Freehold (Monmouth Court-house). Sir Henry Clinton, having evacuated Philadelphia, was marching towards New Brunswick, intending to embark on the Raritan for New York. Washington, coming from Valley Forge in pursuit, gave him battle. The day was very hot, and the result was an uncertainty, General Charles Lee's misconduct, for which Washington reprimanded him on the field, preventing a victory, and at night the British withdrew quietly. Lee was afterwards court-martialed and suspended from command for a year. Monmouth was the scene of "Molly Pitcher's" famous exploit. She was Mary Hays of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, wife of John Hays, a soldier in the First Pennsylvania Artillery. Molly was with the army, and engaged in bringing water to the battery, which was behind a hedgerow, her husband managing one of the cannon. The British made a charge, and a shot killing him, the officers, having no one to manage the gun, ordered it withdrawn. Molly saw her husband fall and heard the order; dropping her bucket, she seized the rammer and served the gun with skill and dexterity. Next morning General Greene presented her to General Washington, who conferred upon her the office of Sergeant. She afterwards lived at Carlisle Barracks, and died there in 1823.

GREATER NEW YORK.

The Dutch city of New Amsterdam, which became New York by the English conquest in 1664, was of slow growth. It had hardly more than twenty thousand inhabitants at the time of the Revolution, being less than either Boston or Philadelphia, and a map made in 1767 shows that the town scarcely extended beyond Wall Street. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were sixty thousand people, and its rapid growth began through large immigration after the War of 1812, and was stimulated by the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, which gave it greatly increased foreign trade. By the new Charter of "Greater New York" coming into operation in 1897, the city was made, next to London, the largest in the world, being expanded beyond Manhattan Island, so as to include all the outlying cities. It now consists of five boroughs, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond, having an area of three hundred and twenty square miles, and a population exceeding three and one-half millions. If Jersey City and the other New Jersey settlements on the west side of the Hudson were added, the population would be four millions. This great city is about thirty-five miles long from north to south, and nineteen miles wide. The long and narrow island of Manhattan stretches thirteen miles, while it is not much over two miles broad in the widest part, and sometimes narrows to a few hundred yards, particularly in the northern portion. The Harlem River and the winding strait of Spuyten Duyvel separate northern Manhattan from the mainland. The island is very rocky, excepting the southern part, which is alluvial, and at the upper end the cliffs rise precipitously from the Hudson over two hundred and thirty feet into Washington Heights, and the surface descends sharply on the eastern side to the Harlem flats. It does not take the visitor long to recognize, however, that the capacious harbor, the converging rivers and numerous adjacent arms of the sea combine all the requisites of a great port, and they could not have been better planned if human hands had fashioned them. There is a vast wharf-frontage, for over fifty miles of shore-line are available for shipping, thus accommodating an almost limitless commerce. This has made the metropolis and continues its wonderful growth.

At the lower end of Manhattan is the Battery Park, of about twenty acres, with the elevated railways coming over it from both sides of the city, and joining at the lower point of the island in a terminal station at the South Ferry. Here were located the old forts for the city defense, but the park superseded them after the War of 1812, and in the earlier years of the nineteenth century this was the fashionable resort for an airing. The old circular fort, Castle Garden, now the Aquarium, was formerly a popular place of amusement, and here, under the auspices of the great manager, Barnum, Jenny Lind made her first appearance in America in 1850. The Park contains a statue of John Ericsson. The lower point of the island is Whitehall Slip, and here is the Government Barge Office, an appanage of the Custom House. To the northward of the Battery is the Bowling Green, the space between them having been the site of the original Dutch palisade fort which guarded New Amsterdam. A row of fine residences was built here, which afterwards became the favorite locality for steamship offices, and the new Custom House is now being constructed on their site. This Bowling Green, a triangular space of about a half-acre, was in the early days surrounded by the homes of the proudest Knickerbockers. For seven years during the Revolution, and until the evacuation, November 25, 1783, this was the British headquarters. Here lived Cornwallis, Howe and Clinton, Benedict Arnold occupied No. 5 Broadway, and Washington's headquarters was in No. 1, on the west side, now occupied by the towering Washington Building, rising nearly three hundred feet to the top of the cupola. To the eastward is the spacious Produce Exchange, in Italian Renaissance, with its huge square tower, part of the ground on which it stands having been the site of the house where Robert Fulton lived and died. Talleyrand also once lived on Bowling Green. In the centre is the statue of Abraham de Peyster, an original Knickerbocker, erected in 1895. There was a leaden statue of King George III. here at the opening of the Revolution, but it was pulled down when the Declaration of Independence was promulgated in 1776, carried to Litchfield, Connecticut, and melted into bullets for the Continental soldiers, so that it was facetiously said at the time that "King George's troops will probably have his melted Majesty fired at them."

BROADWAY.

The two smaller streets on either side of the Bowling Green, Whitehall and State Street, unite to the northward and form Broadway. This is the chief highway of New York, and one of the most famous in the world, extending in various forms all the way to Yonkers, a distance of nineteen miles. The long and narrow formation of Manhattan Island puts Broadway longitudinally in the centre of the city, and necessarily throws into it an enormous traffic. One can hardly make any extended movements in New York without getting into Broadway. Hence the noted street has its show, always on exhibition, of the restless rush of life in the modern Babylon. The architecture of its great buildings, which tower far skyward, excites admiration, and its perpetual din of traffic, with the moving crowds and jam of vehicles, is the type of New York activity. This wonderful street is eighty feet wide between the buildings, and extends of that width from the Bowling Green five miles to Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street; and from its upper end, beyond this, the "Grand Boulevard," one hundred and fifty feet wide, with pretty little parks in the centre, is prolonged northward. In its course, which inclines somewhat to the westward, Broadway diagonally crosses Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and at the Central Park boundary intersects Eighth Avenue. Here is the "Merchant's Gate," entering the Park from Broadway, the opposite entrance from Fifth Avenue being known as the "Scholar's Gate." The intermediate entrances at Sixth and Seventh Avenues are the "Artist's Gate" and the "Artisan's Gate."

A survey of Broadway gives the best idea of the characteristics of New York. Its lower course is a succession of wealthy financial and business establishments and huge office buildings, and the adjacent streets on either side are similarly occupied. Banks, trusts, insurance offices, and manufacturers' and merchants' counting-rooms, railroad and steamship offices are everywhere. But in the midst of all this display of worldly wealth and grandeur is the quiet graveyard at the head of Wall Street, wherein stands the famous Trinity Church. Its chimes, morning and evening, summon the restless brokers and business men to attend divine service, though few may take heed. It is a wealthy parish, with over $500,000 annual revenue, maintaining a magnificent choir and various charities, and owns valuable buildings all about. The old graveyard stretches along Broadway, and in Church Street, behind, the elevated railway trains rush by every few minutes. It is part of the valuable domain of Trinity Church that "the heirs of Anneke Jans" have long been trying to recover. Anneke Jans Bogardus was an interesting Dutch lady who died in Albany in 1663, having outlived two husbands. The first husband owned the whole of the Hudson River front of New York between Chambers and Canal Streets, with a wide strip running back to Broadway. Her heirs sold this to the British Colonial Government, and it was known as the "King's Farm," being afterwards given as an endowment to Trinity Church. This is what the present generation of heirs want to recover, but thus far have gained more notoriety than cash by the effort.

In 1696 the first Trinity Church was built, being afterwards burnt, while a second church was built and taken down, to be replaced by the present fine Gothic brownstone edifice, whose magnificent spire rises two hundred and eighty-four feet. This church was dedicated in 1846, and its chancel contains a splendid reredos of marble, glass and precious stones, the memorial of William B. Astor, while the bronze doors are a memorial of his father, John Jacob Astor. The churchyard is chiefly a mass of worn and battered gravestones, resting in the busiest part of New York, the oldest stone being dated 1681, for it has been a burial-place more than two centuries. Near its northern border is the Gothic "Martyrs' Monument," erected over the bones of the patriots who died in the British prison-ships, moored over on the Brooklyn shore during the Revolution. There are hints, however, that it was not so much the reverent memory of these heroes that prompted the erection of the monument as the desire of the vestry to stop the proposed opening of a street through the yard. There is also a remembrance that, while these patriots were in prison dying, among their relentless foes was the Trinity rector, Dr. Inglis. When General Washington came into New York in 1776 he desired to worship at the church, and sent an officer to Dr. Inglis, on Sunday morning, to request that he omit reading the usual prayers for the king and the royal family. The rector refused, and afterwards said: "It is in your power to shut up the churches, but you cannot make the clergy depart from their duty." Among the noted graves is that of Charlotte Temple, under a flat stone, having a cavity out of which the inscription plate has been twice stolen. Her romantic career and miserable end, resulting in a duel, have been made the basis of a novel. William Bradford's grave is here, one of Penn's companions in founding Philadelphia; but he removed to New York, published the first newspaper there, and for fifty years was the official printer. A brownstone mausoleum covers the remains of Captain James Lawrence of the frigate "Chesapeake," killed in action in 1813, when his ship was taken by the British ship "Shannon," his dying words being, "Don't give up the ship." Here also are buried Alexander Hamilton, Robert Fulton, Albert Gallatin and other famous men, almost the latest grave being that of General Philip Kearney, killed in the Civil War.

SOME FAMOUS BUILDINGS.

The great number of immensely tall office-buildings on lower Broadway, literally "sky-scrapers," so encompass the street as to give it the appearance of a deep canyon as one gazes along it between them. The Bowling Green Building out-tops the Washington Building, and there are the Welles, Standard Oil and Aldrich Court Buildings, the latter marked by a tablet of the Holland Society, being erected on the site of "the first habitation of white men on Manhattan Island." Opposite it is one of the most curious appearing of these tall structures, the Tower Building, nearly two hundred feet high and only twenty-five feet wide. Just above, the tall light sandstone building of the Manhattan Life Company is surmounted by a cupola three hundred and fifty feet high. The Empire Building rises twenty stories, and the American Surety Building at the corner of Pine Street, nearly opposite Trinity churchyard, twenty-three stories, three hundred and six feet, being surmounted by the various weather-gauging instruments of "Old Probabilities." Here are also the magnificent buildings of the Union Trust and the Equitable Life Companies.

Opposite Trinity Church, Wall Street leads off from Broadway, with winding course and varying width, down to the East River, following the line of the ancient Dutch palisade wall which it has replaced. Here is the financial centre and the domain of the bankers. One block down, Broad Street enters from the south, and the narrower Nassau Street goes out to the north. At this corner, on the one hand, is the white marble Drexel Building, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan's office, and on the other the United States Treasury and Assay Office. The huge Manhattan Trust Building also is there, rising three hundred and thirty feet, and opposite is the Stock Exchange, while across Broad Street from the latter is the Mills Building, the home of many bankers and brokers. In Nassau Street is the magnificent building of the Mutual Life Insurance Company. These financial structures at Broad and Wall Streets are regarded as the most valuable real estate in the world. The Treasury and Assay Office contain most of the gold owned by the Government, and in the latter the kegs of gold are made up that are shipped to Europe. It holds millions of gold bars that make annual excursions in fast steamers across the ocean and back again, to adjust our varying foreign exchange balances. The Treasury is a white marble building fronted by an imposing colonnade and a broad flight of steps, and here is a bronze statue of Washington on the spot where he was inaugurated the first President of the United States in 1789, the location being then occupied by the old Federal Hall, where the first Congress met. Farther down Wall Street, the next corner is William Street, where there is a massive dark granite building with an elaborate Ionic colonnade. The interior contains a large rotunda surmounted by a dome supported by eight immense columns of Italian marble. This building was originally constructed for the Merchants' Exchange, and it afterwards became the Custom House. It is hereafter to be the office of the National City Bank, the largest financial institution of New York. Wall Street goes on to the river, where there is a ferry to Brooklyn. Down William Street is the broad, low, granite building, with a columned portico, of the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company, another financial institution of renown.

It is evident, as Broadway is traversed northward between the huge office-letting structures, reared skyward, and among them the little, narrow, crooked streets, pouring their traffic into the main stream, carrying a vast, surging mass of humanity, that the crowded-in New Yorker, deprived of lateral expansion, thus seeks needed relief by mounting upward. Fulton Street here stretches across the island from river to river, the turmoil from its conflicting streams of traffic showing the full tide of restless development in lower Broadway. Above is the white marble Park Bank and the enormous St. Paul Building, rising three hundred and eight feet, twenty-six stories high. Opposite is the sombre church of St. Paul, with a tall spire, the oldest church-building in New York, built in 1756, containing the memorial of General Montgomery, who fell at the storming of Quebec in 1775, and in the graveyard a monument to Emmet, the Irish patriot. Just beyond is the triangular City Hall Park, with Park Row diagonally entering Broadway. Here can be got an idea of the rush and restlessness of New York, for two enormous streams of traffic pour together into lower Broadway, at probably the worst street-crossing in the world.

THE CITY HALL PARK.

The New York City Hall Park was the ancient "Commons," or public pasturage, and it now contains the headquarters of the city government, and may be regarded as the political and business centre. It is enclosed by Broadway, Park Row and Chatham Street, a triangular space, formerly a sort of garden around the City Hall, but now well occupied by other buildings. At the southern extremity is the Post-office, which cost $7,000,000, a grand granite structure in Doric and Renaissance, with a fine dome and tower, which are a landmark for miles. Around this Park, and in the many streets radiating from it, are a vast aggregation of corporate institutions and great buildings devoted to all kinds of business. Here are the offices of newspapers, banks, trusts, insurance companies, railways, lawyers, politicians, exchanges, etc., with lunch-rooms and restaurants of every grade, liberally provided to feed or stimulate the multitude. The famous hotel of a past generation, the Astor House, rich in historical associations, stands on the opposite side of Broadway from the Post-office. Along Park Row are the great newspapers, and here is Printing House Square, adorned with statues of Benjamin Franklin and Horace Greeley, appropriate in this region deluged with printer's ink. Here is the Ivins Syndicate Building, finished in 1898, the loftiest structure in New York, twenty-nine stories, its towers rising three hundred and eighty-two feet. The tall and narrow Tribune Building, of red brick with white facings, has its clock tower reared two hundred and eighty-five feet, while beyond is the Pulitzer Building, of brownstone, with a gilded dome, its apex rising three hundred and seventy-five feet. The building of the American Tract Society on Nassau Street is twenty-three stories and three hundred and six feet high, with a restaurant on the top. Park Row runs into Chatham Square, over which the Brooklyn Bridge terminal comes out, with elevated and surface railroads all about. This is a location of cheap shops and concert halls, and is prolonged into the Bowery, an avenue of the humbler classes, lined with shops, theatres and saloons, generally crowded, and having four sets of street cars running on the surface, besides the elevated roads above. The ancient Dutch farms on this part of the island were known as the "Bauereies," whence came the name of the street.

Chambers Street bounds the City Hall Park on the north, and upon it faces the Court-house, a massive Corinthian building of white marble, finished in 1867, famous as the structure which the "Tweed Ring" of that time used to extract about $15,000,000 from the city treasury on fraudulent bills, or more than five times the actual cost of the work. It stands on part of the site of an old fort, which in the Revolution was the British outpost commanding the approach to the city by the Northern or Bloomingdale Road, now Broadway. The City Hall, to the southward, is a less pretentious and much older building, constructed in the Italian style, of white marble with freestone at the back to the northward, it being supposed at the time of its completion, 1812, that "no one of importance would ever live to the north of the building," then a broad expanse of farms. Here is the office of the Mayor and the meeting-place of the Board of Aldermen, and its chief apartment is the "Governor's Room," adorned with portraits of various Governors of New York and Revolutionary patriots, and having among its treasures Washington's desk and chair which he used when first President of the United States, and also the chairs of the First Congress. To the southwest of the City Hall a fine statue of Nathan Hale, an early victim of the Revolution, executed by the British in New York in 1776, faces Broadway.

Near Chambers Street and the northern end of the Park a noted building stands on the opposite side of Broadway, a modest brownstone structure without any pretension nor of much height, but containing a famous bank, whose phenomenal success is everywhere known. This is the Chemical Bank, originally started as a chemical manufacturing company with banking privileges. The chemistry seems to have been a failure and soon abandoned, but the banking talents were so well developed that the shares of $100 par value have sold for over forty times that sum. The capital is only $300,000, but it has amassed a surplus over twenty times the amount, and is the strongest bank in New York. Among the large shareholders are said to be three New York ladies who married foreign titles—the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough (who was Miss Pine, afterwards Mrs. Hamersley, and now Lady Beresford), the Duchess de Dino (Miss Sampson), and the Comtesse de Trobriand (Miss Jones). It is here that the noted Mrs. Hetty Green generally conducts her financing, a lady of immense fortune and peculiar ideas, who has been one of the greatest money accumulators of New York. Across Chambers Street, and occupying an entire block, is the building that originally was "Stewart's Store," where the late Alexander T. Stewart made most of his success in the dry-goods trade, now converted into a vast office building for all kinds of business. This was the outpost of the "Dry Goods District," for Broadway northward for several blocks, including a wide belt of adjacent streets, now deals with all kinds of products of the mill and loom, clothing and similar articles. Here are located the agents and factors for many mills at home and abroad, and their traffic sometimes exceeds a thousand millions of dollars a year. The pulse of the American dry-goods trade throbs in this locality, weakening or strengthening as poor or good crops give the farmers and working-people a surplus to spend upon dress. Mr. Stewart once said that if every woman decided to pass a single season without a new bonnet it would sufficiently diminish trade to bankrupt this whole district. Canal Street crosses New York through the northern portion of the district, a broad highway, formerly a water course draining an extensive swamp across Broadway to the Hudson River. In this locality, east of Broadway, are two famous regions—the "Five Points," now, however, much improved, and "Chinatown." The latter, in Mott Street, has its Joss House, restaurant, theatre and opium joints, and is picturesque with swinging lights and banners. In Leonard Street, standing where once was part of the swamp, is the noted Tombs City Prison, thus named because originally it was a sombre gray building in the gloomy Egyptian style, but this was recently replaced by a modern structure. The Criminal Courts adjoining are connected with it by a bridge.

PETER COOPER AND PETER STUYVESANT.

At Bond Street, in advancing up Broadway, are encountered the booksellers, this with adjacent streets being the home of much of that trade. In Lafayette Place is the spacious Astor Library, and in the wide Astor Place is the handsome new building of the Mercantile Library. The former is now a part of the New York Public Library. A half-century ago the site of the Mercantile Library was occupied by the "Astor Place Opera House," then a leading theatre, and in the adjacent streets occurred the "Macready riots" in 1849. The rivalries of Edwin Forrest and Macready resulted in an effort by the partisans of the former to prevent the latter from playing in the Opera House on the night of May 10th. The Forrest faction attacked the building with stones, and the police being unable to control them, troops were called out, and, firing several volleys along Astor Place, they suppressed the riot and dispersed the mob, but at a cost of about sixty killed and wounded. At the end of Astor Place and its junction with Third Avenue is the Cooper Institute, occupying an entire block, a large brownstone building with a fine front, founded and endowed in 1857, at a total cost of about $1,000,000, by Peter Cooper, for the free education of men and women in science and art. His statue stands in front. It also received in 1900 additional gifts from his executors and $300,000 from Andrew Carnegie. Peter Cooper was a wealthy manufacturer and merchant of the broadest philanthropy. At a recent anniversary of the Institute his son-in-law, Abram S. Hewitt, speaking of him, said: "Fifty years ago three men, all of whom started in life as poor boys, got together and talked over various ways by which they could be of benefit to the public. They were Peter Cooper, Ezra Cornell and Matthew Vassar. The latter said he would found a school for girls, and he founded Vassar College. Mr. Cornell said he would found a school for boys, and he founded Cornell University. Peter Cooper said he would found a school for both girls and boys, and he founded Cooper Union. But Mr. Cooper's school differs from the others, in that here, any boy or girl may receive an education absolutely free of charge." Opposite the Cooper Institute is an immense red building, the "Bible House," the home of the American Bible Society, where the Scriptures are printed by the millions, in all languages, for distribution throughout the world—over eighty different languages and dialects being used.

Diagonally northeast from Astor Place runs Stuyvesant Street, formerly the country lane leading out to the ancient farmhouse of old Governor Stuyvesant, surnamed "Peter the Headstrong." Here was built "St. Mark's Church in the Bowerie" in the last century, then a mile out of town, and the quaint little Stuyvesant House still stood, at that time, perched on a high bank near the church, having, with its odd-looking overhanging upper story, been built of small yellow bricks brought out from Holland. In the days of New Amsterdam this region was Governor Stuyvesant's "Bauerie," and to it he retired when compelled to surrender to the English in 1664. He lived in this secluded spot for eighteen years, dying in 1682, and his brown gravestone occupies a place in the wall of the church. He was the last of the Dutch Governors, energetic, aristocratic and overbearing, and described by Irving as a man "of such immense activity and decision of mind that he never sought nor accepted the advice of others;" Irving further saying that he was a "tough, sturdy, valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate leather-sided, lion-hearted, generous, spirited old Governor."

Returning to Broadway, for a mile or more it, with the adjacent streets, is the great retail shopping district. Here on the pleasant afternoons are throngs of shoppers. A short distance above, Broadway bends to the left, displaying Grace Church, with its rich marble façade, beautiful spire, and adjoining rectory, chantry and church house, an unique ecclesiastical group, dating from 1846, when it was far "up town," but now almost covered-in by the huge surrounding stores. Fourteenth Street crosses beyond, and here is Union Square, a pretty oval park of about four acres, adorned by an ornamental fountain and statues of Washington, Lafayette and Lincoln. Large buildings and stores surround the square, the chief being Tiffany's noted jewelry establishment. Fourteenth Street is a wide avenue, with an extensive shipping trade. To the eastward of Broadway is the Academy of Music and the noted Tammany Hall. This is the seat of the "Tammany Society," established in 1789 for benevolent purposes, but now controlled by the Democratic political organization ruling New York. The Hall is a capacious brick structure with stone facings, surmounted by a statue of its presiding genius, the old chief and warrior of the Lenni Lenapes, St. Tammany, who with outstretched hand beneficently looks down upon the street. The sturdy Indian, however, was probably more used to the mild and just methods of William Penn and his Quakers on the Delaware than to the political schemes on the Hudson, of which fate seems to have made him a patron saint.

MADISON SQUARE.

Broadway reaches Madison Square at Twenty-third Street, another wide highway crossing the city, and also intersects Fifth Avenue, which is the western side of the Square. This junction has a park of about six acres, surrounded by large hotels and noted buildings, and alongside the triangular intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue is a handsome granite monument to General Worth, a hero of the War with Mexico. The plateau on which it stands is usually availed of as the site for the official reviewing stage for processions. This Square is the great centre of elaborate civic and military displays, and has, with its surroundings and the light stone of the adjacent buildings, an air that is decidedly Parisian, it occupying much the same position for New York as the Place de la Concorde in Paris, or Trafalgar Square in London. In Madison Square are statues of Admiral Farragut (the finest statue in New York), William H. Seward, President Arthur and Roscoe Conkling. At the northwest corner of the Square was for many years Delmonico's famous restaurant, since moved farther up town. Its owner, after feeding wealthy New Yorkers on the choicest viands for several decades, finally lost his mind, and in a fit of aberration wandered over into the wilderness in New Jersey, and becoming lost in the woods, actually died of starvation. The new Appellate Court of New York is on the eastern side of the Square; at the northeast corner is the Madison Square Garden, and at the southeast corner the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, where the great clerical censor of New York, Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, occupies the pulpit. Madison Square may be regarded as the social centre of modern New York. Far to the northward Fifth Avenue stretches, with its rows of palatial brownstone residences, and towards the north-northwest Broadway extends for two miles to Central Park, passing many hotels, theatres, and the tall "French flats" that have been devised for residences in the crowded city where the land surface is so scarce. It also passes, at the intersection of Sixth Avenue, the Greeley and Herald Squares, with statues of Horace Greeley and William E. Dodge, and the New York Herald Building. A short distance beyond is the Metropolitan Opera House, the finest theatre in the city, rebuilt after a fire in 1893. Broadway at Fifty-ninth Street reaches the southwest corner of Central Park and intersects Eighth Avenue, and here is the Columbus Monument, a tall shaft surmounted by a marble statue, erected in 1892. Broadway then becomes the magnificent "Grand Broadway Boulevard," with rows of trees, prolonged far northward.

FIFTH AVENUE.

Fifth Avenue, one hundred feet wide, is probably the New York street that is most talked about, for they say the main object of working so hard to get rich in the metropolis is to be able to live in a fine mansion on Fifth Avenue. This great highway extends northward almost in the centre of Manhattan Island, but it has an humble beginning, starting from the original "Potter's Field," where for many years the outcast and the unknown were buried and over a hundred thousand corpses are believed to have been interred. When the city spread beyond this cemetery it was decided to make the place a park, and thus was formed Washington Square on Fourth Street, a short distance west of Broadway, an enclosure of about nine acres. From this Square Fifth Avenue is laid in a straight line six miles northward, to the Harlem River. The fine Washington Centennial Memorial Arch spans the avenue at the southern end, near the Square, marking the Centenary of Washington's inauguration as President. In the lower portions the famous avenue has been largely invaded by business establishments, but above, it is the finest residential street in the world, there being four or five miles of architectural magnificence, in which for two miles it borders Central Park. The street displays the best dwelling and church architecture, the progress northward into the newer portion showing how the styles have changed. All railways have been carefully excluded from this street. At the southern end the older houses are generally of brick, gradually developing into the use of brownstone facings, and then into almost uniform rows of elaborate brownstone buildings, with imposing porticos reached by high and broad flights of steps. The rich yet gloomy brown is somewhat monotonous, but as Central Park is approached this is broken, as all styles of designs and materials are used. Fifth Avenue has the great "Methodist Book Concern" at Twentieth Street, and in this neighborhood are also several of the leading book houses. The wealthy and exclusive Union Club is at Twenty-first Street, with the Lotus Club in a more modest house adjacent.

Northward from Madison Square the great street stretches up the aristocratic grade of Murray Hill, with its rows of stately buildings. Parallel and a short distance eastward is Madison Avenue, also a street of fashionable residence, and second only to Fifth Avenue in grandeur. At Twenty-ninth Street is the plain and substantial granite Dutch Reformed Church, and to the eastward is an odd-looking little church that has attained a wide reputation. It is a picturesque aggregation of low brick buildings, set back in a small enclosure between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and looking like a quaint mediæval structure. Some years ago a pompous rector, when asked to read the last prayers over the dead body of an actor, sent the sorrowing friends to this church, saying he could not thus pray for the ungodly, but they might be willing to do it at the little church around the corner. The public quickly caught on, through newspaper aid, and the result was that this attractive Church of the Transfiguration performed the last rites in presence of an overflowing congregation, and its official title has since been overshadowed by the popular one of "the Little Church Around the Corner." It is much attended by the theatrical fraternity, and contains a handsome memorial window to Edwin Booth.

Mounting the gentle grade of Murray Hill, we come to Thirty-fourth Street, the locality typifying the two greatest fortunes amassed in America before the advent of the Vanderbilts. The whole block between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets is occupied by the towering Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, built of brick and sandstone in German Renaissance, and occupying the land originally the home of the Astors, while across Thirty-fourth Street is the white marble Stewart palace. The ancestor of the Astor family, John Jacob Astor, accumulated the largest fortune known in this country before the Civil War, his estates representing the early growth of New York, and the wealth coming from the advancing value of land as the city expanded. He was a poor German peasant-boy who came from the village of Waldorf, near Heidelberg, to London, and worked there prior to 1783, making musical instruments for his brother. In that year, at the age of about twenty, he sailed for America with $500 worth of instruments, meeting a furrier on the ship, who suggested that he trade the instruments for American furs. This he did in New York, and returning to London, sold the furs at a large profit. Coming back to New York, he established a fur-trade with England, and built ships for his business. He prospered, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century was worth $250,000. Then he began buying land and houses in New York, built many buildings, and was so shrewd in real-estate investments that they often increased a hundredfold. He was liberal and charitable, and dying in 1848, his estate, then the largest in the country, was estimated at $25,000,000. His chief public benefaction was the Astor Library, which his son, William B. Astor, also aided, so that besides the buildings it has an endowment of about $1,800,000. The great Astor estates, now represented by the fourth generation, are estimated at over $200,000,000.

The splendid palace at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street was built by Alexander T. Stewart when at the height of his fame as the leading New York merchant. Intended to eclipse anything then known in New York, he expended $3,000,000 upon the building and its decoration, so that this house outshone all other New York residences until the Vanderbilt palaces were erected farther out Fifth Avenue. Its latest occupant has been the Manhattan Club. Stewart's fortune was accumulated through the facilities at New York for successful trading, though much of his wealth was afterwards invested in large buildings in profitable business localities, and notably in great hotels. Stewart, like Astor, began his career with almost nothing, but at a later period. He was born at Belfast, Ireland, in 1802, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, but before taking his degree migrated to New York as a teacher in 1818. He got into the dry-goods trade in a small way near the City Hall Park, and his business grew until he acquired all the adjacent buildings, and put up the store at Chambers Street, and afterwards the retail store farther up Broadway. Enlarging in every direction, his business became the greatest in the country, with branches in the leading cities. He was an extensive importer, and owned various factories making the fabrics he sold. His business methods were profitable but unpopular, involving the remorseless crushing of rivals, so that he had few friends and many enemies. Yet he was charitable, sending a shipload of provisions to relieve the Irish famine in 1846, and he made large public gifts to aid suffering. When he died he was building on Fourth Avenue an enormous structure intended as a "Home for Working Girls," on which $1,400,000 were expended. It was opened soon after his death, but with such stringent regulations that a rebellion soon arose among the intended beneficiaries, and it had to be closed. There was a shrewd suspicion that the difficulty came by design, for the building was soon reopened as a hotel. Stewart had scarcely moved into his marble palace when he died, his body being put temporarily into a vault in the churchyard of old "St. Mark's Church in the Bowerie," awaiting removal to the magnificent mausoleum preparing for it at Garden City, Long Island. Then came the horrible news that the corpse had been stolen to avenge business tyranny. The childless widow lived in gloomy grandeur in the palace until her death, rarely seeing visitors, and having watchmen pacing the sidewalk at all hours. Stewart left no direct descendants, and his great business has gone, like his estate, to strangers.

THE VANDERBILTS.

The construction of the white marble Stewart palace was the first serious innovation made upon the rich brownstone fronts of Fifth Avenue, the possession of which was a necessary adjunct to social standing in New York before the Civil War. The material, quarried generally in Connecticut, was in such extensive use that it gave a distinctive coloring to New York, its sombreness and uniformity of architecture making most of the residential streets corridors of gloom. For years, as a local authority described it, "our new houses and blocks were all turned out from the same moulds, and apparently congealed from the same coffee-colored liquid." The builders, since the war, have made large inroads with other materials, thus giving more individuality to the finer buildings of later construction. To the eastward, Fourth Avenue is tunnelled for several blocks under Murray Hill, to carry street railways up to the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street, the open spaces above, giving the tunnel light and air, being surrounded by pleasant little parks, so that the widened street, called Park Avenue, is an attractive residential region, the view being closed to the northward by the louvre domes of the Vanderbilt railway station.

Continuing out Fifth Avenue, the "Old Brick Church" of the Presbyterians, built solid and substantial, with a tall spire, stands about on the most elevated portion of Murray Hill, the congregation dating from 1767. A short distance beyond, at Thirty-ninth Street, is the finest club-house in New York, the elaborate brick and brownstone Union League Club, its spacious windows disclosing the luxurious apartments within. Just above is the historic Vanderbilt house, where the old Commodore lived—a wide, brownstone dwelling, having alongside a carriage entrance into a small courtyard. The Vanderbilt fortunes, the greatest accumulated, represent the financially expansive facilities of modern New York as manipulated by corporation management and the Stock Exchange. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, born on Staten Island in 1794, in 1817, at the age of twenty-three, owned a few small vessels, and estimated his wealth at $9000. He became a steamboat captain, and went into the transportation business between New York and Philadelphia, afterwards broadening his operations, and in 1848 owning most of the profitable steamboat lines leading from New York. When the California emigration fever began, he started ocean steamers in connection with the transit across the Isthmus of Panama. This business grew, and at the height of his steamship career the Commodore owned sixty-six vessels. The finest, named the Vanderbilt, which cost him $800,000, he gave the Government for a war vessel, to chase the rebel privateers. As American vessel-owning became unprofitable, he determined to abandon it and devote himself to railway management, having already bought largely of railway stocks. When he thus changed, he estimated his fortune at $40,000,000. He got control of various railroads leading east, north and west from New York, buying the shares at low prices, his excellent methods improving their earning powers, so that their value greatly enhanced. The greatest of these corporations was the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. When the Commodore died his estate was estimated at $75,000,000, left almost wholly to his son William H. Vanderbilt. When the latter died it had reached $200,000,000, bequeathed chiefly to his two eldest sons, Cornelius, who died in 1899, and William K. Vanderbilt. The family are now housed in a row of palaces farther out the avenue near Central Park, and there are fabulous estimates of their colossal fortunes, which are the greatest in America, and probably in the world.

Upon the west side of Fifth Avenue the New York Public Library is being erected on the site of the old Croton Reservoir, which occupied the summit of Murray Hill, and behind it is the pretty little Bryant Park, extending to Sixth Avenue. This Library comes from the consolidation of the Astor and Lenox Libraries, augmented by the Samuel J. Tilden Trust Fund, amounting to about $2,500,000. North of this, Forty-second Street crosses the city, having the Grand Central Station of the Vanderbilt lines opposite Fourth Avenue, the only railway station in New York, though other roads are expecting to come in by tunnels under the rivers. At Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue is the finest American synagogue, the Jewish Temple Emanu-El, a magnificent specimen of Saracenic architecture, the interior being rich in Oriental decoration. Creeping plants tastefully overrun the lower portions of its two great towers. There are numerous fine churches on this portion of the avenue, two of which are rather more famous than the others. When the old Dutch Governor Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Indians, he founded an orthodox Dutch church in 1628. This church is now a costly brownstone structure in Decorated Gothic at the corner of Forty-eighth Street, having a crocketed spire two hundred and seventy feet high. Its inscription tells us it is the "Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the City of New York, organized under Peter Minuit, Director General of the New Netherlands, in 1628, chartered by William, King of England, 1696." The present church was built in 1872. Occupying the entire block at Fiftieth Street is the magnificent white marble Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick, in Decorated Gothic, with two spires rising three hundred and thirty-two feet. This noble church much resembles the great Cathedral at Cologne, particularly in the interior. Behind it, fronting on Madison Avenue, is the Archbishop's white marble residence, and adjacent is the old building of Columbia College, the original King's College of New York, founded in 1754 by a fund started from the proceeds of various lotteries, which then raised $17,215. It now has new buildings elsewhere.

In the neighborhood of these churches there must not be overlooked, in this part of Fifth Avenue, the residence of Helen Gould, a square-built house with an elaborate portico, at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. This was originally the home of one of the most extraordinary men ever developed in New York—Jay Gould. He was an orphan boy in Northeastern Pennsylvania, who became a clerk in a country store, a surveyor and map-maker, and finally was employed in a tannery, and to sell its leather first took him to New York. Finally he removed there, and soon became a leading Wall Street stock operator. Nobody ever made such daring ventures; he became the "great bear" on the market, wrecking, pulling down, ruining; controlling newspapers, courts, legislatures, and being even accused of trying to bribe a President. Then, as he acquired wealth, he became an extensive investor in railways and telegraphs, and died, leaving a fortune estimated at $80,000,000. He is buried in a magnificent mausoleum, a miniature of the Pantheon, in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the northern suburbs, and his daughter Helen is trying, by her beneficent charities, to make the best use she can of the share of the money she inherited. Westward from Fifty-first Street are the famous Vanderbilt palaces where most of the sons and daughters of William H. Vanderbilt reside, five grand residences which cost $15,000,000 to build and furnish. Standing among them is the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, said to be the largest and wealthiest in the world of this denomination, where the late pastor, Dr. John Hall, is described as preaching to $250,000,000 every Sunday. This is the most splendid portion of Fifth Avenue, with grand residences all about, and as Central Park is approached, there are also enormous apartment-houses and huge hotels. The avenue reaches the Park at Fifty-ninth Street, and for two miles its grand buildings face that attractive pleasure-ground. At Seventieth Street is the Lenox Library, the benefaction of James Lenox, and at Eighty-second Street the Metropolitan Museum of Art, containing some of the finest collections in the world, and patterned largely after the British Museum. Its treasures of art and science, antiquities and museums, are valued at $9,000,000, and it has an elaborate building fronting on Fifth Avenue, within the Park.

CENTRAL PARK.

New York is very proud of its great pleasure-ground, the Central Park, upon which has been lavished all that art and money could accomplish. This Park is a parallelogram in the centre of Manhattan Island, a half-mile wide and two and a half miles long, covering eight hundred and forty-three acres, though nearly one-fourth of this space is occupied by the Croton water reservoirs. The original surface was either marsh or rock, very rough, and with topography generally the reverse of that needed for a park. It took prodigious labor and an enormous outlay to overcome the difficulties, but skillful engineering and landscape gardening have made the most of the unsightly surface, so that it has become one of the handsomest parks in the world, its beauties increasing as the growing trees mature. Entering at the "Scholar's Gate" from Fifth Avenue, the road within the Park leads by a gently winding course past vista views and pretty lakes to the Mall, or general promenade. Here, on pleasant days, thousands gather to listen to the music. To the westward are broad green surfaces giving a tranquil landscape, and looking northward through the avenue of elms upon the Mall, a little gray stone tower called the Observatory closes the view far away over another pretty lake. At the end of the Mall a terrace is crossed bordering this lake, the ground sloping to its edges. Here a fountain plashes on one side, and on the other is the concert ground, overlooked by the Pergola, a shaded Gallery. Across the lake, on the Observatory side, is the Ramble, a rocky, forest-covered slope with paths winding through it, and on the highest point a massive Belvedere. There are a menagerie and an aviary, and the children have playgrounds and varied amusements. Beyond this enchanting region the road winds past statues and ever-changing beauties of garden and landscape, and comes out in a space alongside the smaller reservoir, where stands Cleopatra's Needle, brought from Egypt and set up near the Museum of Art. Then the road passes alongside the larger reservoir, with barely enough room to get through between it and Fifth Avenue, though both are admirably masked. The northern portion of the Park has greater natural attractions and less ornamentation, the land ascending to a fine lookout on the western side, where there is a grand view over the Harlem River, displaying the tall arches of the "High Bridge" bringing the Croton Aqueduct across, and the tower alongside, which makes a high level reservoir. The expanding city, however, is extending its buildings over large surfaces north and west of the Park.

One Hundred and Tenth Street is the northern boundary of Central Park. Upon the western side of the Park, in Manhattan Square, is being gradually constructed the American Museum of Natural History, with elaborate buildings and collections already exceeding $3,000,000 in value. Near the northwestern corner of the Park, extending to One Hundred and Twenty-third Street, is the long and narrow Morningside Park, a high elevation held by massive retaining walls on the hill-slope, and ascended by flights of steps. Morningside Avenue, its western boundary, has at One Hundred and Twelfth Street what will be the largest ecclesiastical edifice in the United States, the new Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1892, and building slowly progresses. The splendid St. Luke's Hospital adjoins to the northward, while to the northwest, on an elevated site overlooking the Hudson River, are the fine new buildings of Columbia College in an enclosure of about twenty acres. This great University has buildings and collections valued at $7,000,000, an endowment of $12,000,000, and is attended by about two thousand students. Farther westward, upon the high ground at the edge of the Hudson River, stretches the stately Riverside Park for about three miles, making a magnificent drive, along which many handsome residences are being constructed. Near its northern end is the tomb of General Grant, a white granite mausoleum ninety feet square and surmounted by a cupola, which was finished in 1897 and cost $600,000. The interior arrangement is like Napoleon's tomb in Paris, the body, contained in a red porphyry sarcophagus, being placed in an open crypt below the centre of the dome. Beyond Central Park, the broad public roads known as the Boulevards traverse the island northward, and many elaborate structures are being erected along them.

SPUYTEN DUYVEL AND CROTON.

The Spuyten Duyvel Creek, the strait connecting the Harlem with the Hudson, winds through a deeply-cut gorge around the northern end of Manhattan and makes it an island. Knickerbocker, the veracious historian of early Dutch New York, tells how it got its name. Old Governor Stuyvesant, he says, had a wonderful trumpeter, Anthony von Corlaer, who persisted in swimming across during a violent storm, and lost his life. Thus of it, Knickerbocker writes: "The wind was high, the elements were in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass across the water. For a short time he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink, and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand (to arouse the people to arms), he took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil—en spyt den duyvel—and daringly plunged into the stream. Luckless Anthony! Scarcely had he buffeted half-way over when he was observed to struggle violently, as if battling with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively he put his trumpet to his mouth, and giving a vehement blast, sank forever to the bottom. The clangor of his trumpet, like that of the ivory horn of the renowned Paladin Orlando, when expiring on the glorious field of Roncesvalles, rang far and wide through the country, alarming the neighbors around, who hurried in amazement to the spot. There, an old Dutch burgher, famed for his veracity, and who had been a witness to the fact, related to them the melancholy affair, with the fearful addition (to which I am slow in giving belief) that he saw the Duyvel, in the shape of a huge moss-bunker (a species of inferior fish), seize the sturdy Anthony by the leg and drag him beneath the waves. Certain it is, the place, with the adjoining promontory which projects into the Hudson, has been called Spyt den Duyvel ever since."

Grant's Tomb, New York

The narrow and elevated northern prolongation of Manhattan is the picturesque district of Washington Heights. Here is the attractive Trinity Church Cemetery, laid out on the battlefield of Harlem Heights, a hotly contested Revolutionary conflict, fought on September 16, 1776, and some distance northward, on the highest point of the island, elevated two hundred and sixty feet above the Hudson River, there are still seen the remains of Fort Washington, which was bravely but unsuccessfully defended against British attacks in the following November, and had to be abandoned. Across the Harlem River is the ancient suburb of Morrisania. Here was Washington's headquarters during those conflicts, and here lived Lewis Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his half-brother, Gouverneur Morris, a noted New York statesman, who bore a striking resemblance to General Washington. The historic old house at Morrisania was afterwards acquired by Madame Jumel, and when Aaron Burr, in his old age and poverty, met this wealthy widow, he courted and married her in 1833, he being then seventy-eight years old. Here they lived for a brief period "during the days of his octogenarian love," as the annalist has it, but soon quarrelled and separated. The house is now preserved as a Revolutionary Museum. Not far away was the Grange, the home of Alexander Hamilton, who planted there a group of thirteen trees named after the thirteen original States of the Union, in which all flourished, as we are credibly informed, excepting the "South Carolina tree," which persisted in growing up very crooked. Upon the top of Washington Heights and the precipitous slopes of the Spuyten Duyvel and Harlem there are many fine villas, and down in the bottom of the gorge the New York Central Railroad seeks its route out to the Hudson River bank. The historic old King's Bridge spans the Harlem, deep down in the valley, while all along the river is the fine new drive, the "Speedway," upon which the New Yorkers display the qualities of their fastest horses.

The splendid Washington Bridge, built of steel at a cost of $2,700,000, carries one of the Boulevards across the Harlem at a height of one hundred and fifty feet; but the great landmark is the High Bridge which brings the Croton Aqueduct over, its tall granite piers and graceful arches displaying singular beauty from every point of view. This aqueduct is forty miles long, and has been well described as "a structure worthy of the Roman Empire." It originally cost $12,500,000, subsequent improvements absorbing millions more. The Croton River, coming down through Westchester County, falls into the Hudson about twenty-five miles above the city, and its headwaters are dammed, making artificial lakes gathering the supply. The Aqueduct was finished in 1842, and, going through tunnels and rock-cuttings, has a cross-section of about fifty-four feet and an inclination of one foot to the mile, or thirty-three feet in the distance to the Harlem River. About one hundred and fifteen millions of gallons go through it daily, moving at the rate of a mile and a half per hour. Three huge pipes carry the water across the High Bridge at one hundred and sixteen feet elevation. There are eight arches in the river crossing, their openings being eighty feet wide and one hundred feet high, to allow the passage of vessels, and seven narrower arches of fifty feet span on the banks. At the New York end of this picturesque bridge is the tall tower, rising two hundred and sixty-five feet, which has water pumped into its surmounting tank to supply the highest parts of the island. New York, however, long since outgrew the capacity of this famous aqueduct, so that a new one of much greater size was tunnelled underground and finished in 1890, which is fourteen feet high, and bored at an average depth of one hundred and fifty feet below the surface, and is carried three hundred feet under the Harlem River bed, its estimated daily capacity being three hundred millions of gallons. The receiving reservoirs in Central Park hold over a thousand millions of gallons. An imposing gate-house at One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street admits this supply into the northern city mains. The great Quaker Bridge dam across the Croton is two hundred and seventy-seven feet high and thirteen hundred and fifty feet long, making the most enormous artificial reservoir in the world, holding forty thousand millions of gallons. It has cost New York over $70,000,000 to thus insure an ample water supply, free of all risk from drought.

THE BRONX AND THE NEW PARKS.

Across Harlem River, to the north and east, is the attractive region of the Bronx, much of the surface being yet in its primitive condition as maintained in the old estates that have come down from the early days of the Knickerbockers. Here are being laid out several new and large parks. Van Cortlandt Park, near the Hudson, about four miles north of the High Bridge, covers about eleven hundred acres, Pelham Bay Park, on the shore of Long Island Sound, nine miles from the Harlem, seventeen hundred and fifty acres, and the Bronx Park, between them, six hundred and fifty acres. These three great pleasure-grounds are being gradually developed, and the plan is to connect them with magnificent tree-lined avenues six hundred feet wide. The western verge of Van Cortlandt Park finely overlooks the Hudson, and it is intended largely for military uses, with parade-grounds and rifle-ranges. It has an attractive lake; and the quaint old mansion where lived the Van Cortlandts, whose successive generations owned the estate, built in 1748, is preserved as a Museum of Colonial Relics. To the eastward, a shallow and almost aimless little stream, flowing from above White Plains down to Long Island Sound, with many pools and rapids, and occasionally broadening into mirror-like lakes, was long the eastern boundary of New York City. This is the Bronx River, coming through a green, well-watered and shaded valley, a half to three-quarters of a mile wide, and a considerable part of this bewitching region makes the Bronx Park,

"Where gentle Bronx, clear, winding, flows

The shadowy banks between;

Where blossomed bell or wilding rose

Adorns the brightest green."

The wildness and seclusion of this place, its natural charms and romantic character, make one almost believe that New York cannot possibly be near such an attractive wilderness. Nature seems to have especially designed it for a park, and art cannot improve it. Huge rocks and giant trees flourish here, among them the Delancey pine, one hundred and fifty feet high and straight as an arrow, standing in a prominent position and having a huge branch reaching upward upon one side, with interlacing boughs, making it appear not unlike a gigantic harp. The Delanceys once owned the place. A "balanced boulder" is nearby, weighing hundreds of tons, yet very easily rocked. The Bronx in one portion flows deep down between high, rocky walls, where the thin-armed white birches wave their slender limbs a hundred feet above the water. Here was an early home of the Lorillards, now a Museum and large Botanical Garden. Here are also the grounds of the New York Zoological Society, the animals roaming in extensive enclosures, where they are placed, as far as possible, in their native surroundings.

The peninsula of Throgg's Neck is the northern headland at the entrance of East River into Long Island Sound. Beyond this, the waters deeply indent the New York shore, and there is thrust out the green peninsula of Pelham Neck. This is some distance beyond the Bronx. Eastchester Bay is on the southern side of the neck; Pelham Bay beyond it; and immediately in front City Island, reached by a long drawbridge. To the north is Hunter's Island, connected by another bridge. Hunter's Island and more than two square miles of the hills and meadows adjacent on the mainland make the new park of Pelham Bay. Various old mansions scattered over this domain were the homes of the Hunters, Lorillards and other prominent families. The island belonged to many generations of Hunters, and near the bridge a large gateway has "Hunter's Island" carved on one of the marble gate-posts. Years ago another wealthy man bought the island, and these words offending him, he brought a marble-mason out from New York, who chiselled them off, and carved instead the words "Higgins's Island." But after Higgins had his day and was gathered unto his fathers, the next owner, revering rather the antiquity of the place, had "Higgins" eliminated and "Hunter's Island" restored, though the gate-post became quite thin under this treatment. On the western edge of Pelham Bay Park is Hutchinson's River, flowing down into Eastchester Bay, and recalling the days of the Salem witchcraft. Poor Anne Hutchinson fled here to escape burning as a witch, and on City Island built a hut on a little cape still called Anne Hook. She lived there peacefully for a year, harming nobody and declining every invitation to stir from her humble abode. One day a young girl went to visit Anne, but found the hut in ashes, and before the door lay the poor woman, where she had been tomahawked and scalped by the Indians. No one has built a house on Anne Hook since, and many have been the tales told of ghostly Indian revels on bleak and rainy nights around the site of the burning hut. On the mainland were Indian villages, and here have been found relics, and in 1899 there was exhumed the skeleton of an Indian warrior.

EAST RIVER AND HELL GATE.

The Harlem River, flowing into the East River, divides Manhattan from Ward's Island, and this, with Randall's Island to the north and Blackwell's Island to the south, forms the group of "East River Islands" upon which are the penal and charitable institutions of the great city. The chief of these are on Blackwell's Island, a long, narrow strip stretching nearly two miles in the centre of East River, and barely more than two hundred yards wide. It covers one hundred and twenty acres, and has the penitentiary, almshouses, workhouses and hospitals, the spacious buildings being of granite quarried there by the convicts. Over on the New York City shore is the extensive Bellevue Hospital. In cases of vagrancy and minor crimes, the offender is said to be "sent up to the Island." Ward's Island has a surface of two hundred acres, and here are the Lunatic Asylum and Emigrant Hospital. Randall's Island has the institutions for children and idiots, while upon Hart's Island, out in Long Island Sound, are industrial schools and the pauper cemetery. The buildings are all upon a most elaborate scale, and it costs over $2,000,000 for their annual maintenance. A steamboat ride along East River, with these extensive establishments and their well-kept grounds passing in review, is a most interesting suburban excursion.

The Long Island shore to the southward of Ward's Island is thrust out in a way that curves and contracts the East River passage, which, turning eastward just below where the Harlem River comes in, goes through the famous Hell Gate to reach the Sound. Formerly, the swift tidal currents boiled and eddied through this dangerous pass, Hallett's Point, jutting out from Long Island, narrowing the channel, and Pot Rock, Flood Rock, the Gridiron and other reefs making navigation perilous. Many were the wrecks here, and frequent ineffective efforts were made to improve the passage. The Government finally undertook the work in 1866 under a comprehensive plan projected by General Newton. His first task was the removal of the Hallett's Point reef, a mass of rock projecting three hundred feet into the stream and throwing the whole tidal current coming in from the Sound against the great opposing rock called the Gridiron. He first sunk a shaft upon the Point and excavated the inland side so that it made a perpendicular wall which was curved around, and designed for the future edge of the river. From the shaft, tunnels were bored into the reef under the river in radiating directions, being connected by concentric galleries. The design was to remove as much rock as possible without letting the water in from overhead, and then to blow the rocky roof and supporting columns into fragments and remove them at leisure. This work began in 1869, the shaft being sunk thirty-two feet below mean low water and the tunnels drilled out, inclining downward under the river. In 1876 the task was finished, and thousands of separate dynamite blasts had been placed in the roof and supporting columns, ready for the explosion on Sunday, September 24th. This being the greatest artificial explosion ever attempted, there was much trepidation shown in New York for fear of the shock, while everywhere the keenest interest was taken in the result. The blast was entirely successful, being discharged by General Newton's little child, who touched the electric key. The calculation had been so accurately made that the great reef was pulverized, and the fragments fell into the spaces excavated beneath without causing more than a slight tremor in the adjacent region. By a similar system and more extensive work, Flood Rock was afterwards removed from mid-channel, the second great blast reducing it to fragments, being discharged in October, 1885. The terrors of Hell Gate are gone, though the tide still flows swiftly through the strait.

THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.

The growth of population on Long Island has caused various new bridges and tunnels to be projected for crossing East River. One new bridge is to cross at Blackwell's Island, with a pier on the island. Another now nearly completed, and estimated to cost $10,000,000, crosses from Grand Street to Broadway in Brooklyn. The Long Island Railroad is arranging to bore a tunnel under East River, to be operated by electricity, to bring its trains into New York. The East River being the locality for most of the foreign shipping, the bridges are at high elevations, the great Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses from City Hall Park, being one hundred and thirty-five feet above the water. Its massive piers are among the tallest structures about New York, rising two hundred and sixty-eight feet. This, the largest suspension bridge in the world, was begun in 1870 and opened for traffic in 1885. The piers stand upon caissons sunk into the rocky bed of the river, which is forty-five feet below the surface on the Brooklyn side and ninety feet below on the New York side. Their towers carry four sixteen-inch wire cables that sustain the bridge, which is built eighty-five feet wide, giving ample accommodation for two railways, two wagon roads also carrying electric cars, and a wide raised footway in the centre. The bridge cost nearly $15,000,000, the distance between the piers is about sixteen hundred feet, and its entire length between the anchorages of the cables is three thousand four hundred and seventy-five feet. The cable anchorages are enormous masses, each containing about thirty-five thousand cubic yards of solid masonry. The whole length of the bridge and its elaborate approaches is considerably over a mile. Its projector was John A. Roebling, who died during the early work, and its builder, his son Washington Roebling, who caught the dreaded "caisson disease" while superintending labor under water, and for years afterward an invalid, watched the progress of the later work from his chamber window on Brooklyn Heights nearby. The bridge has carried an enormous traffic, taxing its capacity to the utmost, and its passengers average over a million a week. The view from its raised footway is one of the most superb sights of New York, disclosing both cities, and the extensive wharves and commerce of East River, the Navy Yard just above, and for miles over the surrounding region and down through the harbor to the distant blue hills of Staten Island.

THE CITY OF CHURCHES.

The Borough of Brooklyn, which has grown from the overflow of New York, whose people are said to go over there "chiefly to sleep or be buried," is popularly known as the "City of Churches." A large portion of the working population of the metropolis, as well as the merchants and business men, make it their home and dormitory, while there are beautiful cemeteries in the suburbs peopled largely by dead New Yorkers. Greenwood, overlooking New York harbor from Gowanus Heights in South Brooklyn, is regarded as one of the finest American cemeteries. In no other city can be found such an aggregation of churches, developed in a past generation, and under the ministry of a regiment of distinguished clergymen, then led by Beecher and Storrs, so that the popular title was well bestowed. Brooklyn is entirely the growth of the nineteenth century, a growth due to the inability of New York to spread, excepting far northward. It stretches several miles along East River and three or four miles inland, and grows rapidly. When the century began, however, it was hard work to find three thousand people there, and, strangely enough, they had to cross over to New York to go to church. Just about the time old Peter Minuit was buying Manhattan from the Indians, a band of Walloons first settled in Brooklyn. Their descendants drove cows across East River to Governor's Island to graze, the Buttermilk Channel between them being then shallow enough for fording, though it is now scoured out deep enough to float the largest vessels, the docks located where the cows then crossed now accommodating an enormous commerce. At first a little ferry from Fulton Street to Peck Slip, New York, accommodated the straggling village, and it has grown into more than a dozen steam ferries of the largest capacity, which (besides the bridge) will carry daily a half-million people across at one cent apiece, this fleet of packet-boats being the greatest transporters of humanity in the world.

The Indians called the region around Wallabout Bay, and Gowanus Mercychawick, meaning "the sandy place." When the Walloons came along, they began settling on the shores of the bay, which they called Waal-bogt, afterwards gradually changed to its present name of Wallabout. In 1646 the town was organized by Governor Kieft as Breuckelen, he appointing Jan Eversen Bout and Huyck Aertsen as "schepens" or superintendents to preserve the peace and regulate the community. During the Revolution the British prison-ships were moored in the Wallabout, and it is estimated that eleven thousand five hundred Americans, chiefly seamen, died upon them, the shores of the bay being full of dead men's bones, which the tides for many years washed out from the sand. In 1808 these bones were finally collected and put in a vault near the Navy Yard, which had been established on the bay. This is the chief naval station of the United States, covering about eighty-eight acres, including all the available space. There is attached a large naval hospital, while between the two is the immense Wallabout Market, covering forty-five acres, the largest in Brooklyn, its buildings being brick structures in the old Dutch style.

Fulton Street is the chief highway of Brooklyn, beginning almost under the shadow of the great Bridge. It is a broad and attractive street, stretching six miles to the eastern edge of the city, and about one mile from the river it passes the various city buildings, including the Post-office, Court-house and Borough Hall, all handsome structures. In front of the Borough Hall is a fine statue of Brooklyn's most famous clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher. From Fulton Street radiate several of the highways leading into the fashionable residential quarter,—Brooklyn or Columbia Heights,—overlooking East River, where the tree-bordered streets are lined with costly and attractive dwellings. Here in Orange Street, in a very quiet spot, is Brooklyn's most noted edifice, a plain, wide, unornamented brick building, with the inscription, "Plymouth Church, 1849." Here preached for nearly forty years, until he died in 1887, Beecher, the great Puritan, whose family was so noted. His father, Lyman Beecher, like the son, fought slavery and intemperance in Boston, Litchfield and Cincinnati, and was an impressive pulpit orator. The old man was eccentric, however, and after being wrought up by the excitement of preaching, is said to have gone home and let himself down by playing on the fiddle and dancing a double-shuffle in the parlor. He had thirteen children, nearly all famous, and has been described as "the father of more brains than any other man in America." Four sons were clergymen and two daughters noted authoresses. Henry Ward, who ruled Brooklyn, and Harriet, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, were among the great leaders of the anti-slavery movement.

Clinton Street leaves Fulton a little beyond Orange, and passes southward through Brooklyn Heights, being the chief street of the fashionable district. Embowered in trees, handsome churches and residences border it, and Pierrepont, Remsen, Montague and other noted streets extend at right angles from it to the edge of the bluff, where the Heights fall sharply off to the river. Here, at seventy feet elevation, and overlooking the lower level of buildings and piers at the water's edge, are the terraces where the finest residences are located, having a magnificent outlook upon the harbor and New York City beyond. The ships land their cargoes within almost a stone's throw of the palaces. In this district there are several large apartment-houses and various clubs, a statue of Alexander Hamilton adorning the front of the Hamilton Club at Remsen and Clinton Streets. Upon Remsen Street is another noted building, the Congregational "Church of the Pilgrims," a spacious graystone edifice with towers, its most prominent tower and spire being a commanding landmark for vessels sailing up New York Bay. There is let into the outer wall of this church, about six feet above the pavement, a small piece of the original "Plymouth Rock" whereon the Pilgrims in 1620 landed in Massachusetts Bay—a dark, rough-hewn fragment, projecting with irregular surface a few inches from the wall. As an author, lecturer and preacher, the veteran pastor for over a half-century, Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, acquired wide renown. Upon Clinton Street is the elegant Pointed Gothic brownstone St. Ann's Episcopal Church, famous for its choir, and on Montague Street the Holy Trinity Church, its spire rising two hundred and seventy-five feet. But almost everywhere are churches, there being about five hundred in Brooklyn. The noted Pratt Institute is one of the best known charities of the city, founded and endowed by Charles Pratt, an oil prince, as a technical school, its spacious and well-equipped buildings caring for thirty-four hundred students. The object of this noble institution is "to promote manual and industrial education, and to inculcate habits of industry and thrift."

GREENWOOD CEMETERY AND PROSPECT PARK.

A border of tombs almost surrounds Brooklyn, for in the suburbs are the great cemeteries which are the burial-places of both cities. In lovely situations upon the surrounding hills are Greenwood, Cypress Hills, Evergreen, Holy Cross, Calvary, Mount Olivet, The Citizens' Union, Washington and other cemeteries, occupying many hundreds of acres. Of these, the noted Greenwood is the chief, covering some four hundred acres on Gowanus Heights, south of the city. This is a high ridge dividing Brooklyn from the lowlands on the south side of Long Island, and it has elevations giving charming views. The route to it crosses various railroads leading to Coney Island, which is the ultimate objective point of most Brooklyn lines of transit. A neat lawn-bordered road leads up to the magnificent cemetery entrance on Fifth Avenue, an elaborate and much ornamental brownstone structure rising into a central pinnacle over a hundred feet high. This entrance covers two fine gateways, with representations of Gospel scenes, the principal being the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection. The grounds display great beauty, the ridgy, rounded hills spreading in all directions, the surface being an alternation of hills and vales, vaults terracing the hillsides, with elaborate mausoleums above and frequent little lakes nestling in the pleasant valleys. Vast sums have been expended on some of the grander tombs, which are upon a scale of great magnificence. The attractive rural names of the walks and avenues, the delicious flowers and foliage, the balmy air, the lakes, valleys and points of beautiful outlook giving grand views over New York Bay and the surrounding country, make Greenwood a park as well as a cemetery, and it is generally admitted to be without a peer. Many costly pantheons and chapels cover the remains of well-known people, and one mausoleum is a large marble church. A three-sided monument of peculiar construction standing on a knoll marks the resting-place of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegrapher. Horace Greeley's tomb has his bust in bronze on a pedestal. A colossal statue surmounts the grave of the great De Witt Clinton, the Governor of New York who built the Erie Canal and thus secured the commercial supremacy of the city. The romantic career of Lola Montez ended in Greenwood. Commodore Garrison, who was at one time Vanderbilt's rival in steamship management, is interred in a mosque. The tomb of the Steinways is a large granite building. A magnificent marble canopy crowns the Scribner tomb, having beneath it an angel of mercy. There is an appropriate monument to Roger Williams. Here are also buried Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine, Peter Cooper, Henry Ward Beecher, James Gordon Bennett, Henry George and others of fame. The Firemen, the Pilots and the New York Volunteers all have grand monuments, the statue sentinels of the latter overlooking the bay. Among these magnificent sepulchres, probably the most magnificent is that of Charlotte Canda, an heiress, who died in early youth, her fortune being expended upon her tomb.

There is a high lookout upon the eastern border of this attractive place, where the flat land at the base of the ridge spreads for miles away to the sea. The Coney Island hotels, by the ocean side, are dim in the distance, and far over the water the Navesink Highlands close the view beyond Sandy Hook. The many railroads leading to Coney Island can be traced out, as on a map, across the level land. Over on the western side of the cemetery is another lookout, having a broad view of Brooklyn and the harbor, extending to the hills of Staten Island and the distant Jersey lowlands beyond. This is the verge of Gowanus Heights, with the busy commerce of the port spread at its base. It is this magnificent scene which the marble sentinels overlook who are guarding the Volunteers' Monument erected by the city of New York.

Between Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park there are various railways, all going to Coney Island, and also the Ocean Parkway, leading thither, a splendid boulevard, two hundred feet wide, and planted with six rows of trees, being flanked on either side by a broad cycle-path. It is laid in a straight line from the southwestern corner of the Park for three miles to the great seaside resort. Prospect Park covers nearly a square mile on an elevated ridge on the edge of Brooklyn, and it has great natural attractions which did not need much change to improve the landscape, while the fine old trees that have been there for centuries are in magnificent maturity. Its woods and meadows, winding roads, lakes and views, combine many charms. On Lookout Hill, rising two hundred feet, the most commanding point, with a view almost entirely around the compass, there is a monument on the slope in memory of the Maryland troops who fell in the Revolutionary battle of Long Island, fought in August, 1776, on these heights. The Park is ornamented with several statues, including one of Abraham Lincoln, and there is a bust of John Howard Payne, the author of Home, Sweet Home. It has an extensive lake, a deer preserve, children's playgrounds, and a concert grove and promenade. The main entrance is a fine elliptical plaza with a splendid fountain, and adorned by a Memorial Arch to the Soldiers and Sailors of the Civil War, and a statue of James Stranahan, a venerable citizen of Brooklyn, foremost in all its good works, who died in 1898. The Brooklyn Institute, an academy of art and science with a large membership, has a large building in the Park.

CONEY ISLAND.

Pretty much all routes through Brooklyn, as already indicated, lead to Coney Island, the barren strip of white sand, clinging to the southern edge of Long Island, about ten miles from New York, which is the objective point of the populace when in sweltering summer weather they crave a breath of sea air. The antiquarians of the island insist that it was the earliest portion of these adjacent coasts discovered, and tell how Verrazani came along about 1529 and found this sand-strip, and how Hudson, nearly a century later, held conferences with the Indians on the island. But however that may be, its wonderful development as a summer resort has only come since the Civil War. It has a hard and gently-sloping beach facing the Atlantic, and can be so easily and cheaply reached, by so many routes on land and water, that it is no wonder, on hot afternoons and holidays, the people of New York and Brooklyn go down there by the hundreds of thousands. Coney Island is about five miles long, and from a quarter-mile to a mile in width, being separated from the adjacent low-lying mainland only by a little crooked creek and some lagoons. It has two bays deeply indented behind it, Gravesend Bay on the west and Sheepshead Bay on the east. The name is derived from Cooney Island, meaning the "Rabbit Island," rabbits having been the chief inhabitants in earlier days. The Coney Island season of about a hundred days, from June until September, is an almost uninterrupted festival, and nothing can exceed the jollity on these beaches, when a hot summer sun drives the people down to the shore to seek relief and have a good time. They spread over the miles of sand-strip, with scores of bands of music of varying merit in full blast, minstrel shows, miniature theatres, Punch and Judy, merry-go-rounds and carrousels, big snakes, fat women, giant, dwarf, midget and pugilistic exhibitions, shooting-galleries, concerts, circuses, fortune-tellers, swings, toboggan slides, scenic railways, and myriads of other attractions; lakes of beer on tap, with ample liquids of greater strength; and everywhere a good-humoured crowd, sight-seeing and enjoying themselves, eating, drinking, and very numerously consuming the great Coney Island delicacy, "clam-chowder." To the clam, which is universal and popular, the visitors pay special tribute. This famous bivalve is the Mya Arenaria of the New England coast, said to have been for years the chief food of the Pilgrim fathers. Being found in abundance in all the neighboring waters, it is served in every style, according to taste. As the Coney Island "Song of the Clam" has it:

"Who better than I? in chowder or pie,

Baked, roasted, raw or fried?

I hold the key to society,

And am always welcome inside."

The long and narrow Coney Island sand-strip may be divided into four distinctive sections—a succession of villages chiefly composed of restaurants, lodging-houses and hotels, built along the edge of the beach, and usually on a single road behind it. In the past generation the rougher classes best knew its western end or Norton's Point, a resort of long standing. The middle of the island is a locality of higher grade—West Brighton Beach. Here great iron piers project into the ocean, being availed of for steamboat landings, restaurants and amusement places, while beneath are bathing establishments. Electricity and fireworks are used extensively to add to the attractions, and there is also a tall Observatory. The broad Ocean Parkway, coming down from Prospect Park and Brooklyn, terminates at West Brighton Beach. East of this is a partially vacant, semi-marshy space, beyond which is Brighton Beach, there being a roadway and elevated railroad connecting them. Brighton is the third section, and about a half-mile farther east is the fourth and most exclusive section—Manhattan Beach. Here are the more elaborate and costly Coney Island hotels. In all this district the power of the ocean is shown in the effect of great storms, which wash away roads, railways and buildings, and shift enormous amounts of the sands from one locality, piling them up in front of another. Huge hotels have had to be moved, in some cases bodily, a thousand feet back inland from the ocean front, to save them, and immense bulkheads constructed for protection; but sometimes the waves play havoc with these. Very much of the money spent by the visitors has to be devoted to saving the place and preventing the wreck of the great buildings. But this does not worry the visitors so much as it does the landlords. On a hot day the vast crowds arriving on the trains are poured into the hotels, and swarm out upon the grounds fronting them, where the bands play. Here the orchestras give concerts to enormous audiences. The piazzas are filled with supper-parties, the music amphitheatres are crowded, and thousands saunter over the lawns. As evening advances, the blaze of electric illumination and brilliancy of fireworks are added, and the music, bustling crowds and general hilarity give the air of a splendid festival. The bathing establishments are crowded, and many go into the surf under the brilliant illumination. Not a tree will grow, so that the view over the sea is unobstructed, and out in front is the pathway of ocean commerce into New York harbor, with the twinkling, guiding lights of Sandy Hook and its attendant lightships beyond. What a guardian to the mariner is the lighthouse:

"'Tis like a patient, faithful soul

That, having reached its saintly goal,

And seeing others far astray

In storms of darkness and dismay,

Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea,

A beacon to some sheltered lee,—

The haven of eternity."

The tall Observatory, on its airy steel framework, rises three hundred feet to overlook the wonderful scene. When the top is reached, the first impression made is by the dissonant clangor of the many bands of music below, heard with singular clearness and much more intensity of sound than on the ground. This discord ascends from all sorts of structures, generally having flat pitch-and-gravel roofs, forming a variegated carpet far below. Coney Island stretches along the ocean's edge, with the lines of foaming surf slowly rolling in. To the eastward, at Brighton and Manhattan Beaches, it bends backward like a bow, with semicircular indentations where the sea has made its inroads. To the westward, the curve of the beach is reversed, and the extreme point of the island ends in a knob having a distinctive hook bent back on the northern side. Behind the long and narrow strip of sand there are patches of grass, and much marsh and meadow, spreading away to the northward, and meandering through the marsh can be traced the crooked little tidal creek and series of lagoons separating Coney from the mainland. Far away northward runs the broad tree-bordered Ocean Parkway, with the hills of Prospect Park and the tombs and foliage of Greenwood Cemetery hiding Brooklyn, and closing the view at the distant horizon. Various railways stretch in the same direction, some crossing the bogs on extended trestle-bridges. Many carriages are moving and thousands of people walking about in the streets and open spaces beneath us, while upon the ocean side the piers extend out in front, with their steamboats sailing to or from the Narrows to the northward, around the knob and hook at Norton's Point. Far south over the water are the distant Navesink Highlands behind Sandy Hook and the low adjacent New Jersey Coast, gradually blending into the Staten Island hills to the westward. Around from the south to the east is the broad and limitless expanse of ocean, where, in the words of Heinrich Heine:

"The cloudlets are lazily sailing

O'er the blue Atlantic sea."

Far to the eastward, seen across the broad Jamaica Bay, are more low sandy beaches, each with its popular resort, though all pale before the crowning glories of Coney Island. There is Rockaway, with its iron pier and railway connecting with the mainland to the northeast, also Arverne and Edgemere, the distant cottage-studded Long Beach, and the hazy sand-beaches of Far Rockaway. And as we gaze over this wondrous scene down by the water side, the freshening wind gives a pleasant foretaste of old ocean, and recalls the invocation of Barry Cornwall:

"The sea! the sea! the open sea!

The blue, the fresh, the ever free!

Without a mark, without a bound,

It runneth the earth's wide regions round.

"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!

I am where I would ever be,

With the blue above, and the blue below,

And silence wheresoe'er I go.

"I never was on the dull tame shore,

But I loved the great sea more and more."

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.

IX.

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.

The Isle of Nassau—Captain Adraien Blok—Roodt Eylandt—Block Island—Great South Bay—Great South Beach—Jamaica Bay—Hempstead Bay—Fire Island and its Lighthouse—Shinnecock—Quogue-East Hampton—Lyman Beecher—John Howard Payne—Garden City—Jericho—Elias Hicks—Flushing Bay—Throgg's Neck—Willett's Point—Little Neck Bay—Great Neck—Sands Point—Harbor Hill—William Cullen Bryant—Oyster Bay—Lloyds' Neck—Nathan Hale—Ronkonkoma Lake—The Wampum Makers—Mamaroneck—Byram River—The Wooden-Nutmeg State—Brother Jonathan—Greenwich—Old Put's Hill—Stamford—Colonel Abraham Davenport—The Dark Day—Norwalk—Sasco Swamp—Fairfield—Pequannock River—Bridgeport—Phineas T. Barnum—Joyce Heth—General Tom Thumb—Jenny Lind—Old Stratford—Milford—New Haven—Quinnepiack—John Davenport—Yale College—Killingworth—Elihu Yale—Steamboat Fulton—East and West Rocks—The Regicides—Wallingford—James Hillhouse—Savin Rock—Saybrook Point—Guilford—Connecticut River—The Sachem's Head—Thimble Islands—Saybrook Platform—Old Saybrook—Thames River—New London—Groton—Silas Deane—Fort Hill—Pequot Hill—Defeat of the Pequots—Pawcatuck—Stonington—Watch Hill Point—Westerly—Orient Point—Plum Island—Plum Gut—Shelter Island—The Gull Islands—The Horse Race—Fisher's Island—Gardiner's Island—Lyon Gardiner—Captain Kidd and his Buried Treasures—Sag Harbor—Montauk Indians—Money Pond—Fort Pond Bay—Montauk Point and its Lighthouse—Ultima Thule—Isle of Manisees—Block Islanders—Whittier—Palatine Wreck.

THE ISLE OF NASSAU.

The first white man who sailed upon Long Island Sound was the bluff old Dutch navigator, Captain Adraien Blok. Desirous of adventure and spoil, he built upon the shore of the Battery, in 1614, the first ship ever constructed at New York, a blunt-pointed Dutch sloop-yacht of sixteen tons, which he named the "Onrest." The four little huts he had upon the shore to house his builders and crew were among the first structures of the early Manhattan colony. Fitting her out, he braved the terrors of the Hell Gate passage and started on a voyage of discovery on Long Island Sound, which he explored throughout. He found the mouth of the principal river of New England, the Connecticut, and coasting around Point Judith, entered Narragansett Bay, and cast anchor before an island with such conspicuously red-clay shores that he called it Roodt Eylandt, or the Red Island, on which Newport now stands. Then he ventured out to sea and found the bluff shores of Block Island, to which he gave his own name. Sated with exploration and loaded with spoil exchanged with the Indians, he then returned to New York and told of his wonderful adventures. His was the first vessel, manned by white men, known to have sailed upon the "Mediterranean of America," as Long Island Sound is popularly called. This grand inland sea is generally from twenty to thirty miles wide, and is enclosed by Long Island, the ancient Isle of Nassau of the Dutch, stretching for one hundred and thirty miles eastward from New York harbor, and being likened to a fish lying upon the water. It has a generally bluff northern shore along the Sound, and the southern coast, which is low and level almost to the eastern extremity, lies nearly due east and west, the island finally breaking into a chain of narrow peninsulas and islands facing the rising sun. The southern border is a continuous line of broad lagoons, separated from the Atlantic by long and narrow sand-bars. The chief lagoon is the Great South Bay, eighty miles long, fronted by the curious formation of the Great South Beach, stretching its entire length, and from one to five miles wide. Upon the outer beaches, and within the lagoons, are a succession of noted seashore resorts. Eastward, beyond Jamaica Bay and Rockaway, is Long Beach, and behind it Hempstead Bay. Then come Jones' Beach and Oak Island, with Massapequa, Amityville and Lindenhurst behind them. Then we are at Babylon and Bayshore, with the Great South Bay fronted by Fire Island, and beyond it the long sand-strip of the Great South Beach. The famous lighthouse of Fire Island, the guiding beacon to New York, one hundred and sixty-eight feet high, is flanked by summer hotels, and its flashing electric light of twenty-three million candlepower is the most powerful on the Atlantic Coast. The Great South Bay spreads far eastward past Patchogue to Moriches, and then comes Quogue and the Hamptons, where the level land rises into the Shinnecock hills. At the eastern extremity are Amagansett and Montauk. It is a long coast, fringed with lights to point the mariner's way into New York harbor.

They tell us that when the "Onrest" came into the Sound there were thirteen tribes of Indians on Long Island, and that it was the mint for the aborigines, these tribes being the great makers of wampum, the Indian money, for which its beaches and bays furnished the materials. The Montauks, on the eastern end, were the most formidable, and were usually carrying on wars with the Pequots, across the Sound in New England. Out on Shinnecock Neck is the reservation where live the small remnant of the Shinnecock tribe, there being barely a hundred of them, each family in a little house on a little farm it tills. Around Jamaica Bay once lived the Jameko tribe, all now disappeared. At quaintly named Quogue, Daniel Webster used to go fishing and bathing. The hill tops of the Hamptons have perched upon them the picturesque old Dutch windmills which are so attractive to the artists, and at East Hampton still stands the venerable gabled house where lived Lyman Beecher in his earlier ministry, and where his elder children, Catharine and Edward Beecher, were born. Here also passed his boyhood, before he began wandering over the earth, the author of Home, Sweet Home, John Howard Payne, his father being the village schoolmaster. Payne's quaint little shingled cottage is East Hampton's most sacred memorial. The inhabitants of East Hampton are so much in love with their healthy home, which dates from 1648, that on its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 1898, the announcement was made that they "like East Hampton in a thick fog better than any other place in full sunshine." Eastward from Jamaica, in the western centre of Long Island, are Creedmoor, the noted rifle range, Hempstead, where the New York troops were mobilized in 1898 for the Spanish War, and Garden City, the model suburban town laid out by Alexander T. Stewart, containing a handsome Episcopal Cathedral. Not far away is Hicksville, and to the northward the ancient town of Jericho. This was a tract bought from the Indians by Robert, the brother of Roger Williams, in 1650, which afterwards became a place of Quaker settlement, and here lived and preached for sixty years the famous Elias Hicks, the founder of one of the Quaker sects. He was an opponent of war and of slavery, and rode all over the country as a missionary preacher.

THE NORTHERN LONG ISLAND SHORE.

The steamboat entering Long Island Sound from New York, after passing Hell Gate and crossing Flushing Bay, emerges from the strait of East River between Throgg's Neck and Whitestone. Upon the end of Throgg's Neck, the jutting point has the graystone ramparts and surmounting earthworks of its ancient guardian, Fort Schuyler. Thrust forward from the Long Island shore, as if to meet it, is the protruding headland of Willett's Point, the Government torpedo station. Here also is an old stone fort down by the waterside, with the extensive ramparts of a modern fort on the bluff above. These are the defensive works commanding the approach to New York from Long Island Sound. In the neighboring havens are favorite anchorages for yachts. Beyond are the expansive waters of the Sound, and far off southward, thrust into the land, are the deep recesses of Little Neck Bay, made famous by its clams, and protected to the eastward by the curiously bifurcated peninsula of Great Neck. The northern Long Island shore is very irregular, and rises into hills. Bold peninsulas and deep bays form it, the surface being corrugated into hillocks and valleys, and penetrated by narrow, shallow harbors. The waves of the Sound have eroded the shores into steep and often precipitous bluffs of gravel, sometimes rising a hundred feet above the water, where narrow beaches, strewn with boulders, border them. At Sands Point is a great peninsula protruding in high sandy bluffs, and behind it is the highest mountain on Long Island, Harbor Hill, rising three hundred and fifty feet above the village of Roslyn, at the head of the deeply indented Hempstead Harbor, where lived at his home of Cedarmere, for many years, William Cullen Bryant, who now sleeps in the little cemetery.

William Cullen Bryant at "Cedarhurst," Roslyn

Oyster Bay is deeply indented into the land to the eastward, surrounded by villas and attractive homes, and beyond protrudes the broad, high headland of Lloyds' Neck. This was strongly fortified by the British in the Revolution, and King William IV., then the youthful Duke of Clarence, was at one time an officer of the garrison. It was attacked and captured by the Americans who came over from Connecticut in 1779, the garrison being taken prisoners. Subsequently the British again took possession, and the French from Newport attacked them in 1781, but were repulsed. The hero of Oyster Bay is Captain Nathan Hale of Connecticut, whose statue stands in New York City Hall Park. He had been sent by Washington in 1776, across the Sound, to examine the British defenses of Brooklyn, and, returning, was captured by some Tories at Oyster Bay, and the next day hanged in New York as a spy. Though but twenty-one years old, he met his fate bravely, saying: "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." The British destroyed his farewell letters, the provost-marshal saying "that the rebels should not know they had a man in their army who could die with so much firmness." Oyster Bay was bought in 1653 from the Matinecock Indians by a Pilgrim colony from Sandwich, Massachusetts, and a treaty made at Hartford established it as the boundary between the Dutch of New York and the English of New England. To the eastward are Huntingdon, Setauket and Port Jefferson, popular resorts, and inland are Jerusalem and Islip, the latter settled and named in the seventeenth century by emigrants from old Islip, Oxfordshire, England. Here is the famous Ronkonkoma Lake, so named by the Indians from the white sand of its shores. It is a pretty sheet of fresh water among the forests, about a mile in diameter, of great depth, and has neither inlet nor outlet, though its surface level regularly rises and falls every four years. Here lived the chief wampum makers, the Secatogue and Patchogue tribes. Their wampum mainly consisted of the thick blue part of clam shells, ground into the form of bugle beads, and strung upon cards a foot long.

ENTERING NEW ENGLAND.

Coming out of New York on the northern shore of Long Island Sound, the land is found to be profusely sprinkled with outcropping rocks, a development so universal that to one place the Indians gave the name of Mamaroneck, meaning "the place of rolling-stones." These rocks are gathered into piles for fences, which cross the surface in all directions, and it requires serious effort to till the stony land. About twenty-five miles from New York is the Byram River, the Connecticut boundary, the old saying being that New England stretches "from Quoddy Head to Byram River." This original Yankee land, though the smallest section of the United States, has made the deepest impress upon the American character. They have not enjoyed the agricultural advantages of other sections, the bleak climate, poor soil and lavish distribution of rocks and sterility making farming hard work with meagre results, so that the chief Yankee energy has been devoted to the development of manufactures, literature, commerce and the fisheries; this wonderful race who have had to practically live by their wits having admirably succeeded. Crossing Byram River brings us into the "Land of Steady Habits," Connecticut, the "Wooden-Nutmeg State," the special home of "Yankee Notions," which gave the country the original personation of "Brother Jonathan" in Governor Jonathan Trumbull, who was so useful to General Washington. Consulting him in many emergencies, Washington was wont to remark, "Let us hear what Brother Jonathan says," a phrase finally popularly adopted by making him the national impersonation.

Connecticut has the great Puritan College of the country—Yale—ruled by the Congregationalists. It has varied manufactures, to which its abundant water-powers contribute, and in which nearly all its people are engaged, its methods being largely the inventions of its own sons, of whom three are prominent—Eli Whitney of the cotton-gin, Samuel Colt of the revolver, and Charles Goodyear of india-rubber fame. When De Tocqueville was in America, he was much impressed by the development of the inventive genius, education and political force of the State, which he described as a little yellow spot on the map, and at a dinner he proposed a toast, saying, in his quaint, broken English: "And now for my grand sentiment: Connect-de-coot—de leetle yellow spot dat make de clock-peddler, de school-master and de Senator; de first give you time, de second tell you what to do with him, and de third make your law and civilization." Connecticut gets more patents proportionately than any other State, one to eight hundred inhabitants being annually granted; it makes clocks for all the world, and leads in india-rubber and elastic goods, in hardware and myriads of "Yankee notions," besides being well in the front for sewing-machines, arms and war material. It is named after the chief New England river, and its rugged surface is diversified by long ridges of hills and deep valleys, running generally from north to south, being the prolongation of mountain ranges and intervales that are beyond the northern border. The picturesque Housatonic comes from the Massachusetts Berkshire hills down through the western counties; the centre is crossed by the Connecticut Valley, which has great fertility and beautiful scenery, while in the eastern section the Quinnebaug River makes a deep valley, and, flowing into the Thames, seeks the Sound at New London. These many hills make many streams, all having water-powers, around which cluster numerous busy factories.

The southwestern town of Connecticut is Greenwich, and in front Greenwich Point is thrust out into the Sound, while, as the Yankee land is entered by railway, on a high hill stands the Puritan outpost, seen from afar—a stately graystone Congregational Church with its tall spire. The ancient Greenwich village was built on the hillside at Horse Neck, and it was here, in 1779, that General Putnam swiftly galloped down the rude rocky stairway leading from the old church, to get away from the British dragoons, on what has since been known as "Old Put's Hill," and they were too much astonished either to chase or shoot him. Beyond is Stamford, a busy factory town, where lived in the eighteenth century Colonel Abraham Davenport, described as "a man of stern integrity and generous benevolence." He was a legislator, and when, on May 19, 1780, the memorable "Dark Day" came in New England, some one, fearing it was the day of judgment, proposed that the House adjourn. Davenport opposed it, saying, "The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty; I wish therefore that candles may be brought." This scene has been immortalized by Whittier. The town of Norwalk is beyond, another nest of busy mills, spreading upward on the hill-slopes from the Sound. The original settlers bought from the Indians in 1640 a tract extending "one day's north walk" from the Sound, and hence the name. Fine oysters are gathered in the spacious bay, and the people make shoes and hats, locks and door-knobs. On the lowlands to the eastward the Pequot Indian nation, once ruling all this part of New England, the name meaning "the destroyers," was finally overpowered in 1637 by the Colonial troops in the Sasco Swamp, now a cultivated farm, with almost the only highly fertile land seen in the immediate region. Most of the Pequots were captured and sold as slaves in the West Indies. Beyond is tranquil Fairfield, embowered in trees and introduced by a rubber-factory, its green-bordered streets lined with cottages, and church-spires rising among the groves, while along the shore it has the finest beach on Long Island Sound.

BRIDGEPORT, OLD STRATFORD AND MILFORD.

Pequannock, the "dark river" of the Indians, flows out of the hills to an inlet of the Sound, where the enormous mills of the active city of Bridgeport have gathered a population of over fifty thousand people, in a hive containing some of the world's greatest establishments for constructing sewing-machines and firearms, building carriages, and making cutlery, corsets and soaps, while other goods also occupy attention. The grand Seaside Park esplanade overlooks the harbor, and towards the north the city stretches up the slopes into Golden Hill, named from its glittering mica deposits, where magnificent streets display splendid buildings. When the Pequots were exterminated in 1637, colonists founded this town, gradually crowding the Paugusset Indians, who owned the land, into a small reservation on Golden Hill. The great establishments to-day are the Wheeler and Wilson and Howe Sewing-Machine Works, Sharp's Rifle Factory and the Union Metallic Cartridge Company; and Bridgeport is also the headquarters of the chief American circus. The stately and high-towered mansion of Waldemere fronts the park, and was the home of Bridgeport's best-known townsman, the veteran showman, Phineas T. Barnum. Born in Connecticut, at Bethel, in 1810, he died at Bridgeport in 1891. He first developed the financial advantages of amusing the public, and possibly humbugging them on a grand scale, and by working upon his oft-quoted theory that "the people liked to be humbugged," twice amassed a large fortune. In early life he wandered over the country earning a precarious livelihood in various occupations, and in Philadelphia in 1834 began his career as a showman. He bought for $1000 a colored slave-woman, Joyce Heth, represented to be the nurse of George Washington and one hundred and sixty-one years old. From her exhibition his receipts reached $1500 a week, and she died the next year. In 1842 he began exhibiting Charles S. Stratton, "General Tom Thumb," a native of Bridgeport, born in 1832, whose size and growth were as usual until his seventh month, when he had a stature of twenty-eight inches, and ceased to grow. Barnum exhibited him in the United States, France and England, and attracted world-wide notoriety. Barnum started the American fashion of paying extravagant sums to opera-singers, in 1849 engaging Jenny Lind to sing at one hundred and fifty concerts in America for $1000 a night, the gross receipts of a nine months' tour being $712,000. He subsequently had his fortune swept away through endorsing $1,000,000 notes for a manufacturing establishment that went down in the panic of 1857. His fortunes were revived, however; he had museums in the leading cities, and in his later life had the "Greatest Show on Earth," which set out every spring from Bridgeport. Tom Thumb in 1863 married Lavinia Warren of Middleboro', Massachusetts, a dwarf like himself, and he died in 1882.

To the eastward a short distance, and in sharp contrast with active Bridgeport, is quiet old Stratford, with Stratford Point protruding in front into the Sound, at the entrance of the stately and placid Housatonic, which comes down through the meadowland just beyond the village. Here there are neither watering-place hotel nor busy factory to disturb the ancient order of things, encumber the greensward, or encroach upon the sleepy and comfortable houses, where one may dream away in the twilight, under the shade of grand trees that are even older than the town. Stratford is much the same now as when settled by a Puritan colony from Massachusetts in 1639, the leader and pastor being Adam Blackman, whom Cotton Mather called "a Nazarite purer than snow and whiter than milk." Across the patches of marshland, adjoining the Housatonic, is Milford, its half-mile-long stretch of village green neatly enclosed, and its houses upon the bank of the silvery Wap-o-wang, back of which spread the wide streets lined by rows of overarching elms. A colony from Milford in England settled here in 1639 and soon crowded the Indians off the land, establishing the primitive church, which was the usual beginning of New England settlements. Then, true to the American instinct, they proceeded to hold a convention, the result being the adoption of the following platform:

Voted, That the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.

Voted, That the earth is given to the saints.

Voted, That we are the saints.

They had a good deal of trouble afterwards, both with the Dutch from New York and the Indians, but the saints ultimately possessed the earth in peace, and their successors are now making straw hats for the country.

THE CITY OF ELMS.

The city of New Haven, the most populous in Connecticut, having a hundred thousand people, is built upon a plain, surrounded by hills, at the head of a deep bay extending several miles northward from Long Island Sound. The magnificent elms, arching over the streets and the Public Green, and grandly rising in stately rows, make the earliest and the deepest impression upon the visitor. In one of his most eloquent passages, Henry Ward Beecher said that the elms of New England are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture. The grand foliage-arched avenues of New Haven are unsurpassed elsewhere, so that they are the crowning glory as well as the constant care of the townsfolk. Among the finest is the avenue separating the Yale College grounds from the Public Green—a magnificent Gothic aisle of the richest foliage-covered interlacing boughs. The Indian name for the region round about New Haven was Quinnepiack, and the placid Quinnepiack River, coming from the northward, flows through a deep valley past the towering East Rock into the harbor. Old John Davenport was the leader and first pastor of the infant colony that settled here. He was a powerful Anglican parish pastor of London who had joined the Puritans, and in 1637 was forced to leave for New England with many of his people. They spent a year in Boston, but in April, 1638, sailed around Cape Cod to the Sound, and landed at Quinnepiack, where they laid out a town plan with nine squares for buildings, surrounding a large central square, the Public Green. At the foundation, Davenport delivered a most impressive sermon from the text, "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars;" and from this came the original scheme of government for the colony by the seven leading church members, who were known as the "seven pillars." The colony got on well with the Indians, who revered Davenport, calling him "so big study man." They bought the whole tract of one hundred and thirty square miles from the Indians for thirteen coats. At first, however, they did not prosper, their trading ventures proving unfortunate, and they determined to abandon the place and remove elsewhere, selecting Jamaica, and afterwards Galloway in Ireland. The ship carrying their prospectors to Ireland sailed in January, 1647, but was never heard from afterwards, save when, as the legend has it, "the spectre of the ship sailed into the harbor in the teeth of a head-wind, and when in full view of the anxious people, it slowly melted into thin air and vanished." Then they decided to remain, and getting on better, in 1665 united their plantation with that of Connecticut at Hartford, under the condition that each should be a capital, a compact observed until 1874, when Hartford was made the sole capital. The British in July, 1779, attacked and partly burnt and plundered the town, the Americans galling them by desultory attacks as they passed through the streets. They captured Rev. Naphtali Daggett, President of Yale College, musket in hand, and with repeated bayonet-thrusts forced him to guide them. When he was wearied and sore from wounds they asked, "Will you fight again?" He sturdily answered, "I rather believe I shall if I have an opportunity." Being forced to pray for the King, he did it thus: "O Lord, bless thy servant King George, and grant him wisdom, for thou knowest, O Lord, he needs it."

The great fame of New Haven comes from Yale College, having two hundred and fifty instructors and over twenty-five hundred students, the orthodox Congregational University of New England, which for two centuries has exerted a most advantageous and widely diffused influence upon the American intellectual character, and around it and its multitude of buildings of every kind clusters the town. In the year 1700 ten clergymen planned to have a college in the colony of Connecticut, and for the purpose contributed as many books as they could spare for its library. In 1701 it was chartered, and began in a very small way at Saybrook, at the mouth of Connecticut River, during the first year having only one student. The pastor of the adjacent village of Killingworth was placed in charge, and for several years the students went there to him, though the commencements were held at Saybrook, and in 1707 the college was located at Saybrook. Subsequently, for a more convenient location, it was removed to New Haven, the first commencement being held there in 1718, and its first building being named Yale College, in honor of Elihu Yale, a native of the town, born in 1648, who went abroad, and afterwards became Governor of the East India Company. He made at different times gifts of books and money amounting to about five hundred pounds sterling, the benefactions being of greater value because of their timeliness. His name was afterwards adopted in the incorporation of the university. Timothy Dwight and Theodore D. Woolsey were perhaps the greatest Presidents of Yale, and among its graduates were Jonathan Edwards, Eli Whitney, Samuel F. B. Morse, Benjamin Silliman, Noah Webster, John C. Calhoun, J. Fenimore Cooper, James Kent, William M. Evarts, John Pierpont and Samuel J. Tilden. The College buildings are of various ages and styles of architecture, the original ones being the plain "Old Brick Row" on College Street, northwest of the Public Green, behind which what was formerly a large open space has been gradually covered with more modern structures. The line of ancient buildings facing the Green has a venerable and scholarly aspect, stretching broadly across the greensward, fronted by noble elms arranged in quadruple lines along the street. One of these houses, Connecticut Hall, was built with money raised by a lottery, and from the proceeds of a French prize-ship in the colonial wars, when Connecticut aided the King by equipping a frigate. There are on the campus statues of the first rector, Abraham Pierson, President Woolsey and Professor Silliman. Various elaborate buildings are also upon adjacent grounds, such as the Peabody Museum, the Sheffield Scientific School, of four halls; the Divinity Halls, Observatory, Laboratory and Gymnasium, while the entrance to the campus from the Public Green is by an imposing tower-gateway known as Phelps Hall. The Peabody Museum has one of the best natural-history collections in the country, and the College Library approximates three hundred thousand volumes. Besides the Academic Department, Yale has schools of Science, Law, Medicine, Theology and the Fine Arts, and its properties and endowments exceed $10,000,000, the grounds occupying nine acres.

NEW HAVEN ATTRACTIONS.

But New Haven is much more than Yale College. It is a great hive of industry, manufacturing all kinds of "Yankee notions," with agricultural machinery, corsets, scales, organs, pianos, carriages, hardware and other things, and it has a large commerce along the coast and with the West Indies. It was to New Haven that the first steamboat navigating Long Island Sound went from New York in March, 1815, the Fulton, which occupied eleven hours in going there, and fifteen hours in returning two days later, being delayed by fog, subsequently, however, making the trip in less time. This boat was constructed by Robert Fulton, and carried a figure-head of him on her bow. She was one hundred and thirty-four feet long, and of three hundred and twenty-seven tons, built with a keel like a ship, having a sloop bow, and being rigged with one mast and sails to accelerate her speed. She was managed by Elihu S. Bunker, and her ability to pass through Hell Gate against a tide running six miles an hour was regarded as one of the marvels of that time. The New York Evening Post of March 25, 1815, describing her, said, "We have been assured that this establishment has cost $90,000, and we believe it may with truth be affirmed that there is not in the whole world such accommodations afloat as the Fulton affords. Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed her in elegance and convenience." Many were the races she had with the "packet-sloops" that plied on the Sound and often beat her, when the wind was fair.

There are tastefully adorned suburbs surrounding New Haven, where the hills afford charming prospects. The two great attractions, however, are the bold and impressive promontories known as the East and West Rocks, which are high buttresses of trap rock, lifting themselves from the plain on each side of the town in magnificent opposition, and rising four hundred feet. The geologists say they were driven up through the other strata, and some people think these grim precipices in remote ages may have sentinelled the outflow of the Connecticut River, between their broad and solid bases, to the Sound. Each tremendous cliff is the termination of a long mountain range coming down from the far North. The Green Mountain prolongation, stretching through ridges southward from Vermont, is represented in the West Rock, while the East Rock terminates the Mount Tom range, through which the Connecticut River breaks its passage in Massachusetts, and part of which rises a thousand feet in the "Blue Hills of Southington," which are the most elevated portion of Connecticut. Thus projected out upon the plain, almost to Long Island Sound, the summits of these two huge rocks afford grand views. In the Judge's Cave, a small cleft in a group of boulders on the West Rock, the three regicides, Goffe, Whalley and Dixwell were in hiding for some time in 1661, and the three streets leading out to this rock from the city are named after them. It is recorded that a man living about a mile away took them food until one night a catamount looked in on them, and "blazed his eyes in such a frightful manner as greatly to terrify them." Dixwell's bones repose upon the Public Green at the back of the "Centre Church," which stands in the row of three churches occupying the middle of the Green that was the graveyard of colonial New Haven, and Whalley is buried nearby.

There is a grand approach to the East Rock, which is elevated high above the marshy valley of Mill River, winding about its base, and upon the topmost crag is a noble monument reared to the soldiers who fell in the Civil War. The whole surface of the East Rock is a park, and upon the face of the cliff the perpendicular strata of reddish-brown trap stand bolt upright. From this elevated outpost there is a charming view over the town spreading upon the flat plain, and the little harbor stretching down to the Sound; and beyond, across the silvery waters, can be traced the hazy hills of Long Island, twenty-five miles away. Two little crooked rivers come out of the deep valleys on either side of the great rock, winding through the town to the harbor, while all about, the country is dotted with flourishing villages. Among them is Wallingford, to which the railway leads northeast amid meadows and brickyards until it reaches the high hill, whose church-towers watch over the population, largely composed of plated-ware makers. When this town was founded, John Davenport came out from New Haven and preached the initial sermon from the appropriate text, "My beloved hath a vineyard on a very fruitful hill."

Hillhouse Avenue, a broad and beautiful elm-shaded street bordered by fine mansions, leads out to the "Sachem's Wood," which was the home of the Hillhouses, of whom James Hillhouse was the great Connecticut Senator after the Revolution. His remains repose in the old Grove Street Burying-Ground, where rest many other famous men of the Academic City, among them Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, Samuel F. B. Morse, Benjamin Silliman, Elbridge Gerry, Roger Sherman, of whom Jefferson wrote that he "never said a foolish thing in his life," Eli Whitney, and Noah Webster, who, before he compiled his famous dictionary, had published the "Elementary Spelling Book," which had a sale of fifty millions of copies. The New Haven City Hall, fronting the Green, is one of the finest municipal buildings in New England. The three churches occupying the centre of the Green are the North, the Centre, and Trinity churches, the first two Congregationalist and the last Episcopal, the row presenting a curiously quaint and ancient appearance. The favorite resort of the people of New Haven is Savin Rock, a promontory four miles away, pushing a rocky front to the Sound at the end of a long sandy beach, and having a good view, being located westward from the harbor entrance.

OLD SAYBROOK.

The Connecticut River flows into Long Island Sound thirty-three miles east of New Haven at Saybrook Point. Between is the venerable village of Guilford, where Fitz Greene Halleck was born, and where the three regicides were also for some time hidden. Out in front is the bold and picturesque Sachem's Head, which got its name from a tragedy of the Pequot War in 1637. The Mohican chief Uncas pursued a Pequot warrior out on this point, and shooting him, put his head in the fork of an oak tree, where it remained many years. The group of Thimble Islands are off shore, having been repeatedly dug over by deluded individuals searching for the buried treasures of Captain Kidd. Saybrook Point was the place of earliest settlement in Connecticut. The first English patent for lands on these coasts was granted to Lord Saye and Seal and Lord Brooke, and the colony was given their double name. The original settlement was planned with great care, as it was expected to become the home of noted men, and a fort was built on an isolated hill at the river's mouth. According to the British historian, it was to Saybrook that Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and Haselrig, with their party of malcontents, intended to emigrate when they were stopped by the order of King Charles I. Had this migration been made, it might have greatly changed the subsequent momentous events in England ending with the execution of that king. A little westward of the old colonial fort guarding the river entrance, a public square was laid out, where, according to the town plan, their houses were to have been built. The first Yale College at Saybrook was a narrow one-story house eighty feet long, and looking much like a ropewalk, which was afterwards removed, with the college, to New Haven. Its founders were pious men, who in 1708 drew up the celebrated "Saybrook Platform," with a declaration that "the churches must have a public profession of faith, agreeable to which the instruction of the college shall be conducted."

The ancient fort at Saybrook, built by Plymouth people in 1635, stood upon a steep and solitary knoll near the Connecticut River, which in 1872 was carried off bodily by a railroad to make embankments across the adjacent lowlands. The earliest governor of the colony came out in 1636, Colonel Fenwick, afterwards one of the regicide judges. Old Saybrook is now a quiet village, chiefly spread along one handsome wide street, canopied over by the arching branches of its stately elms, under which the distant vista view looks almost like a scene through a veritable foliage tunnel. The broad Connecticut flows in front, back and forth with the tide from the Sound, its restfulness in keeping with the ancient town, as yet uninvaded by business bustle or manufacturing energy. The Saybrook fort repelled the Pequots in 1637; and afterwards, in the Connecticut boundary disputes with the Dutch at New York, the latter, according to the veracious chronicler, marched against it "brimful of wrath and cabbage," but seeing it would be stoutly defended, he adds that "they thought best to desist before attacking." The British captured it in 1814, and ascending the river in a sudden raid, destroyed a large number of vessels.

THE THAMES TO THE PAWCATUCK.

The river Thames, coming down out of the hills and receiving the Quinnebaug, flows into the Sound twenty miles east of the Connecticut, and here is the pleasant city of New London, with about fifteen thousand people. Thus the early settlers renewed in the New England colony the names of old London and Father Thames, replacing the original Indian titles of Pequot for the town and Mohegan for the river. New London is built on a hillside, famous for comfortable old mansions and noble trees on the hilly streets, running down the declivity to the harbor, in the upper part of which is a navy yard. On either side of the harbor entrance are the gray walls and grassy mounds of the ancient defensive works, Forts Griswold and Trumbull, which got their chief scars during the Revolution. The most sacred New London memory is of Nathan Hale, who lived there, his little house being preserved as a relic. The Thames is a fine estuary, and upon it are sailed the great Yale and Harvard boat-races. New London was the headquarters of the Connecticut navy during the Revolution, a fleet of twenty-six vessels. After Arnold's treason, he came in September, 1780, with ships and a large force of troops, captured Fort Trumbull and burnt the town. Afterwards they attacked Fort Griswold across the river, losing large numbers in storming it, and when the garrison had surrendered they were massacred. A fine granite Obelisk contains the names of the slain, and bears the inscription: "Zebulon and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives till death in the high places of the Lord." The people of New London go down to the Sound for recreation and clam-bakes, the wide-spreading beaches having numerous hotels and summer cottages. All this region in the early times was the home of the Niantic Indians, a clan of the Narragansetts, their sachem being Ninigret, the brother of Canonicus and uncle of Miantonomoh, whose names are preserved in powerful American warships.

Beyond the Thames is Groton, known as the home of Silas Deane, the early American diplomatist, a hilly township, with little good soil. On its verge are Fort Hill, where Sassacus, the sachem of the Pequots, had his royal fortress, and Mystic, with the popular resort of Mystic Island just off shore. To the northward of Mystic is Pequot Hill, where Colonel Mason attacked that tribe in May, 1637. He had marched out of Rhode Island with ninety English and over four hundred Mohicans and Narragansetts under the sachems Uncas and Miantonomoh, but when they arrived at the Pequot stronghold, the Indian allies were afraid to attack and drew off. Nothing daunted, Mason and his colonial soldiers prepared to do the work alone, and as a preliminary knelt down in prayer. At the sight of this, another sachem, Wequash, who had been their guide, was amazed and asked an explanation, and when he understood it, became so impressed that he was converted, afterwards preaching throughout New England. Mason and his men assaulted the stronghold in the darkness, and got inside the palisades, but being overwhelmed by the superior numbers, fell back after setting fire to the wigwams. The fire compelled the Pequots to flee, and then the English and friendly Indians surrounded the hill and shot down the fugitives, there being six hundred Pequots shot or burnt, this being the death-blow to the tribe. Old Cotton Mather, who recorded it, wrote: "It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God." Sassacus, from Fort Hill, sent reinforcements, but they were too late, although they harassed Mason's retreat, and Sassacus was soon forced also to flee, the remnant of the Pequot tribe being killed or captured in Sasco Swamp.

This region was Pawcatuck, and its chief town now is Stonington, built on a fine harbor, near the Rhode Island boundary, which is protected by the protruding arm of Watch Hill Point, the whole coast thereabout being filled with summer hotels and cottages. Stonington is on a narrow rocky peninsula, and of this town, in the early part of the nineteenth century, President Dwight of Yale College wrote, referring to its reputation, that "Stonington and all its vicinity suffers in religion from the nearness of Rhode Island." The place was bombarded for three days, in 1814, by a British fleet, but all attempts to land were successfully repulsed. Watch Hill Point is a high bold promontory, with sand beaches stretching both ways and hooking around westward so as to enclose Stonington harbor. To the eastward is Westerly on the Pawcatuck River, noted for its fine granite quarries and textile factories.

EASTERN LONG ISLAND.

From the Long Island shore, opposite the mouth of Connecticut River, there protrudes northeastward an elongated and almost bisected peninsula, ending in Orient Point. The eastern end of Long Island divides into two arms, this being the northern one, having at its outer extremity Plum Island, the passage between being the famous "Plum Gut," a short cut occasionally taken by cunning yachtsmen racing around Long Island. Orient Point was originally the "Oyster Pond Point," its name having been modernized, and Plum Island, covering more than a square mile, is said to have been bought from the Indians by the first colonists in 1667 for a hundred fish-hooks and a barrel of biscuit. A succession of islands stretches out from it over northeastward towards the Rhode Island shore, and these guard the entrance to the Sound. The southern arm of Long Island extends much farther eastward than the northern one, and ends in Montauk Point. Enclosed between these branching peninsulas is Shelter Island, thus appropriately named from its well protected harbors. It is a delicious island, about four by six miles in extent, picturesque and irregular in outline, having cliffs and promontories dropping off into tiny coves and bays with little beaches, their shores rich with the attractions that shells and sea mosses give. In the interior are rolling hills and fresh-water ponds. Out in front on either hand are the blue waters of Peconic and Gardiner's Bays, with the broad Atlantic beyond. This island was the home of the Manhasset Indians, and that was its early name. To its hospitable shores fled some of the persecuted Quakers of New England, when driven out by the Puritans, the settlement being made as early as 1652. The records tell that in the eighteenth century George Whitefield came and preached here with such fervor and success that he was constrained to ask, "And is Shelter Island become a Patmos?" It is in a delightful location, and from the breezy hill-tops which have a grand outlook over the azure waters there can be seen a vision

"——of islands that together lie

As quietly as spots of sky

Amongst the evening clouds."

The array of islands guarding the entrance to the Sound beyond Plum Island begins with Great Gull and Little Gull Islands, the latter marking the edge of the "Horse Race," as the rapid tidal current in and out of the Sound between Little Gull and Fisher's Island is called. This Race is off the mouth of the Thames River, beyond which is Fisher's Island, nearer the Connecticut shore, an island nine miles long, and forming a sort of barrier protecting the Thames entrance from the ocean storms. This elongated island, covering about twelve square miles, was originally "Ye Governour's Farme of Fyscher's Island," owned by Governor John Winthrop of Connecticut, to whom it was granted in 1668, remaining in his family for two centuries, when a wealthy New Yorker bought it for a stock-farm. The adjacent waters are now a favorite locality for United States naval evolutions. To the eastward of Shelter Island, and lying in front of Gardiner's Bay, is Gardiner's Island, covering about six square miles, and having a long protruding northern point stretching up towards Plum Island. This island was the Indian Monchonock, and Lyon Gardiner, the first Englishman who settled anywhere in the State of New York, came along in 1639, and bought it from them for some rum and blankets, a gun and a large black dog, and his descendants have since been the owners. He was a veteran of Cromwell's wars, and always had the confidence of the Indians. Gardiner's Island was a favorite resort of the noted freebooter Captain Kidd, and while thousands of people at many places have at various times searched for his buried treasures, this is the only place that anything was ever found. Kidd was the son of a Scottish clergyman, became a mariner, and was sent from New York in an armed vessel to chase the pirates off the coast. Succeeding admirably, he was placed at the head of a new ship, the "Adventure," with one hundred and fifty men, and sent to chastise the freebooters in the East Indies. But after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and entering the Indian Ocean he turned pirate himself, crossing the Indian and Pacific Oceans, rounding Cape Horn, sailing up the Atlantic, and sweeping the West Indies. In two years he circumnavigated the world, became the most famous pirate in history, and landed at Gardiner's Island, burying his treasures. He was afterwards captured in Boston and sent to London, where he was hanged in 1701 on a charge of murder. The Earl of Bellamont, Governor of Massachusetts, took from Kidd part of his plunder, and learning the hiding-place on Gardiner's Island, had the locality dug up, recovering gold, silver, jewels and merchandise, valued at $70,000. Kidd's exploits are commemorated in a song which is of world-wide renown, thus beginning:

"I'll sing you a song that you'll wonder to hear,

Of a freebooter, lucky and bold—

Of old Captain Kidd—of the man without fear,

How himself to the devil he sold.

"His ship was a trim one as ever did swim,

His comrades were hearty and brave,—

Twelve pistols he carried, that freebooter grim,

And he fearlessly ploughed the wild wave."

To the southward of Shelter Island, on the southern peninsula of Long Island, is the well-protected roadstead of Sag Harbor, formerly a famous whaling port, but most of its maritime glory has departed. Massachusetts fishermen first settled the place, and it had at one time a fleet of over forty whale ships, earning $1,000,000 a year; but the California gold-hunting fever in 1849-50 is said to have diverted its mariners and began the paralysis of this industry, which subsequently died out almost everywhere. It has about two thousand people, and its admirable situation has made it an attractive summer resort, while it is also developing some manufactures. On the peninsula to the southward are perched various old-time windmills, with their broad gyrating sails, in the wide-spreading land of the Hamptons. Far to the eastward the peninsula stretches out to Montauk Point, the end of Long Island. Here is the reservation of the remnant of the Montauk Indians, their name meaning the "Fort Country," as they were the most powerful tribe on the island, and made some defenses in their hilly region. The Sachem Wyandance who was at their head when the white men came, in the seventeenth century, was wise and sagacious, and became their firm ally, fighting the Pequots and their other enemies. In all the adjacent waters vast numbers of menhaden are caught. Here was located the camp, in 1898, where the American troops returning from the torrid heats and malaria of the Cuban-Spanish war recuperated, over thirty thousand men being cared for previously to discharge. Captain Kidd was at one time around here also, and is supposed to have sunk bags of treasure in one of the little lakes, which has since been called Money Pond, but none was ever found there. Fort Pond Bay, a spacious harbor on the northern side of Montauk Point, has been often suggested as a haven for transatlantic steamers, being safe and commodious. The plan suggested is to bring the passengers by fast railway trains from New York. Out on the eastern rocky buttress of Montauk Point is the tall white lighthouse tower, containing a most powerful Fresnel light, the gift of the French Government, visible for twenty miles at sea, its intense white light varied by occasional flashes. This is the guiding beacon of the eastern extremity of Long Island, and the solid buttress on which it stands Mrs Sigourney calls—

"Ultima Thule of this ancient isle,

Against whose breast the everlasting surge,

Long travelling on and ominous of wrath,

Forever beats."

THE ISLE OF MANISEES.

Fifteen miles northeast of Montauk Point, out in the ocean, is Block Island, lying midway between the extremity of Long Island and Point Judith, on the western side of the entrance to Narragansett Bay. It is about eight miles long, with a prominent white light for a beacon on each end, north and south, and is a curious isolated place amid the rolling waves of the Atlantic. Its balmy climate and equable temperature have made it a favorite summer resort, being popularly called the "Bermuda of the North," while some of its admirers say it is destined to become the American Isle of Wight. It was known to the Indians as Manisees, the "Isle of the Little God," and when the whites first came, its aboriginal people were great wampum makers. The Puritans campaigned on the island, defeating the Indians, and in 1638 they sent sixty feet of wampum to Boston for tribute, but the English did not permanently settle there till 1661. It is an elongated island, with high bold shores, abrupt hills, narrow valleys and sundry ponds, one, the "Great Salt Pond," near its centre, being of considerable size. The surface, however, is entirely destitute of trees, and the only harbor is behind the protecting refuge of a breakwater, built some time ago by the Government. As the ocean waves are always buffeting and washing away the shores, its ultimate total disappearance is predicted, but this impending fate is said not to seriously alarm the inhabitants, who are, by the way, almost all Baptists. Until recently, so little was actually known of these Block Island folk, who were nearly all born there, and relatives, that a strong belief was prevalent on the adjacent mainland that the genuine native Block Islanders had only one eye apiece. They are strange and antiquated, and many of the old people have never been off the island. Some of them recall as a wonderful journey taken years ago, in early youth, how they ventured so far away from home as to sail "across to the Continent," as they call the remainder of the United States. They gather sea-weed, which brings them quite a revenue, and dig peat, which is largely used for fuel. Their little stone-walled fields, ancient windmills and lily-strewn ponds are picturesque, and their ancestors are buried in the ancient burying-ground, which visitors find interesting, and then climb Beacon Hill to get a view that is unique in being an almost complete circle of the sea. This attractive place, swept by ocean breezes, is the eastern outpost of Long Island, and no better idea of it has ever been given than by Whittier's poem on the Palatine wreck, opening by describing Block Island:

"Leagues north, as fly the gull and auk,

Point Judith watches with eye of hawk;

Leagues south, thy beacon flames, Montauk!

"Lonely and wind-shorn, wood-forsaken,

With never a tree for Spring to waken,

For tryst of lovers or farewells taken,

"Circled by waters that never freeze,

Beaten by billow and swept by breeze,

Lieth the island of Manisees,

"Set at the mouth of the Sound to hold

The coast lights up on its turret old,

Yellow with moss and sea-fog mould.

"Dreary the land when gust and sleet

At its doors and windows howl and beat,

And Winter laughs at its fires of peat!

"But in summer-time, when pool and pond,

Held in the laps of valleys fond,

Are blue as the glimpses of sea beyond;

"When the hills are sweet with brier-rose,

And, hid in the warm, soft dells, unclose

Flowers the mainland rarely knows;

"When boats to their morning fishing go,

And, held to the wind and slanting low,

Whitening and darkening, the small sails show,—

"Then is that lonely island fair;

And the pale health-seeker findeth there

The wine of life in its pleasant air.

"No greener valleys the sun invite,

On smoother beaches no sea-birds light,

No blue waves shatter to foam more white!"

ASCENDING THE HUDSON RIVER.

X.

ASCENDING THE HUDSON RIVER.

Hudson River Scenery—Fort Washington—Fort Lee—The Palisades—Piermont—Greenwood Lake—Tuxedo Lake—Font Hill—Yonkers—Philipse Manor—Mary Philipse—Hastings—Dobbs's Ferry—Tappan Zee—The Flying Dutchman—Tarrytown—André and Arnold—Tappan—Irvington—Sunnyside—Washington Irving—The Sleepy Hollow—Ichabod Crane—Point-no-Point—Rockland Lake—Sing-Sing—Croton Point—Haverstraw Bay—Stony Point—Treason Hill—Verplanck's Point—The Highlands—The Donderberg and its Goblin—Peekskill—Anthony's Nose—Iona Island—West Point—Forts Clinton and Montgomery—Sugar Loaf Mountain—Buttermilk Falls—Constitution Island—Susan Warner—General Kosciusko—Beverly House—Arnold's Treason—Old Cro' Nest—Flirtation Walk—The Storm King—Mount Taurus—Joseph Rodman Drake—The Culprit Fay—Cornwall—Fishkill—Newburg Bay—Newburg and Washington's Headquarters—Ural Knapp—The Tower of Victory—Enoch Crosby, the Spy—The Devil's Dance Chamber—The Long Reach—Poughkeepsie—Lakes Mohonk and Minnewaska—Vassar College—Crom Elbow—Rondout—Kingston—Esopus—Rhinebeck and Rhinecliff—Ellerslie—Rokeby—Wilderscliff—Montgomery Place—Plattekill Clove—Saugerties—Livingston Manor—Clermont—Chancellor Livingston—Fulton's First Steamboat—Catskill Mountains—Natty Bumppo—Rip Van Winkle—Slide Mountain—Kaaterskill Clove—Kaaterskill Falls—Haines's Falls—The Big Indian—City of Hudson—The Dutch—New Lebanon—The Shakers—Mother Ann Lee—Kinderhook—Stuyvesant Landing—Martin Van Buren—Schodack—The Mohicans—Beeren Island—The Overslaugh—The Patroons—The Van Rensselaers—The Anti-Rent War—Albany—New York State Capitol—Albany Medical College—Calvin Edson—Albany Academy—Prof. Joseph Henry—Dudley Observatory—Van Rensselaer Mansion—Vanderheyden Palace—Lydius House—Balthazar Lydius—Anneke Jans Bogardus—Albany Regency—Schuyler Mansion—Erie Canal Basin—Troy—The Monitor—Mohawk River—Stillwater—Schuylerville—Burgoyne's Defeat—General Fraser's Death—Round Lake—Ballston Spa—Saratoga Lake and Town—High Rock Spring—Sir William Johnson—Saratoga Hotels—Saratoga Springs—Congress Spring—Hathorn Spring—Mount McGregor—Fort Edward—Israel Putnam—Jenny McCrea—Baker's Falls—Sandy Hill—Quackenboss' Adventure—Glen's Falls—Last of the Mohicans—Hawkeye—Sources of the Hudson—The Adirondack Wilderness—Hendrick Spring—The Tear of the Clouds—Indian Pass—Tahawas, the Sky-Piercer—Schroon Lake—The Battenkill.

THE HUDSON RIVER SCENERY.

The noble Hudson is one of the most admired of American rivers. It does not possess the vine-clad slopes and ruined castles and quaint old towns of the Rhine, but it is a greater river in its breadth and volume and the commerce it carries. It has scenery fully as attractive in the Palisades and Highlands, the Helderbergs and Catskills, and on a scale of far more grandeur, while the infinite variety of its shores and villas and the many flourishing river towns are to most observers more pleasing. A journey along the Hudson presents ever varying pictures of rural beauty, in mountain, landscape, field and village; at times almost indescribably grand, and again entrancing in the autumn's gorgeous coloring of the forest-clad slopes, and the brilliant picture under our clear American skies. George William Curtis, voicing the opinion of most of our countrymen, is enthusiastic about the Hudson, saying: "The Danube has in part glimpses of such grandeur, the Elbe sometimes has such delicately pencilled effects, but no European river is so lordly in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea. Of all our rivers that I know, the Hudson with this grandeur has the most exquisite episodes. Its morning and evening reaches are like the lakes of a dream." The Hudson may not have as many weird and elfish legends as so many historic centuries and the mythical preceding era have gathered upon the annals of the Rhine, but its beauties, tragedies and folklore have been a favorite theme, and the romantic and poetic fancies of Irving, Drake and Cooper, with many others, have given it plenty of fascinating literature and picturesque incident. Oliver Wendell Holmes thus sings the praises of the Hudson:

"I wandered afar from the land of my birth,

I saw the old rivers renowned upon Earth;

But fancy still painted that wide-flowing stream,

With the many-hued pencil of infancy's dream.

"I saw the green banks of the castle-crowned Rhine,

Where the grapes drink the moonlight and change into wine,

I stood by the Avon, whose waves, as they glide,

Still whisper his glory who sleeps by their side.

"But my heart would still yearn for the sound of the waves,

That sing as they flow by my forefathers' graves;

If manhood yet honors my cheek with a tear,

I care not who sees it—nor blush for it here.

"In love to the deep-bosomed stream of the West,

I fling this loose blossom to float on its breast;

Nor let the dear love of its children grow cold,

Till the channel is dry where its waters have rolled."

THE PALISADES.

In ascending the Hudson from New York, there are passed on either hand the heights which were covered in early Revolutionary days with the defenses of New York, Fort Washington and Fort Lee, but beyond the names no trace of either fort remains. The British captured both in the latter part of 1776, and afterwards held them. Fort Lee is now a favorite picnic ground. Above it rises the great wall of the Palisades, the wonderful formation built up of columned trap rock that extends along the western river bank for twenty miles up to Piermont, this rocky buttress making the northern limit of New Jersey on the Hudson River. Occasionally a patch of trees grows upon the tops or sides of the Palisades, while the broken rocks and débris that have fallen down make a sloping surface from about half-way up their height to the water's edge. These columns rise in varying heights from three to five hundred feet. This grand escarpment of the Palisades is a giant wall along the river bank, sometimes cut down by deep and narrow ravines, through which the people behind them get brief peeps at the picturesque stream far below. Their general surface makes a sort of long and narrow table-land, barely a half-mile to a mile wide, dividing the Hudson from the valley of the Hackensack to the westward, the top being usually quite level, and in most cases having a growth of trees. These desolate-looking Palisades are a barrier dividing two sections of country seeming in sharp contrast. To the westward, the inhabitants lead simple pastoral lives in a region of farm land and dairies. To the eastward, the opposite shore of the Hudson is a succession of villas and fashionable summer resorts, whither the New York people come out, seeking a little rest and freshness after the season's dissipation. From the tops of the Palisades are admirable views both east and west, displaying some of the finest sunrises and sunsets seen along the great river. Extensive blasting operations, to get the building-stone and paving material for which they form valuable quarries, are marring the beauty of the Palisades, but legal arrangements are maturing for their preservation. Their highest elevation, the Indian Head, not far above Fort Lee, rising five hundred and ten feet, has been ruined by these blasts, which at times will break off many thousand tons of rock at a single explosion.

Palisades of the Hudson

The rocky buttress of Piermont, the termination of the Palisades on the Hudson, gets its name from a pier, a mile long, which is extended from the shore at the foot of the mountain out to deep water, and a branch of the Erie railway terminates here. This line runs inland northwestward through a fine country. Over there is Greenwood Lake, known as the "miniature Lake George," a beautiful river-like body of water, ten miles long and a mile wide, almost entirely enclosed in the mountains, and presenting extremely picturesque scenery. This lake is at a thousand feet elevation, with clear and deep spring water, and in the neighborhood are the smaller but as charming Lakes Wawayanda, Macopin and Sterling. The long look over mountain and vale causing an expression of surprise in broken English from an Indian gazing upon the attractive prospect, is said to have named the first of these pretty little lakes;—"Away, way, yonder," he said, but it sounded like "Wa-wa-yanda," and the name has since clung to it. Not far away, among these mountains, is Tuxedo Lake, the fashionable resort of the Tuxedo Park Association, also reached by the Erie railway. This club of wealthy New Yorkers has made a paradise among the Allegheny foothills, with game-preserves, golf-links, club-house, and many cottages for the members.

Above Spuyten Duyvel Creek the western Hudson River shore presents the monotonous front of these Palisades, stretching for miles apparently without a sign of active life; but the eastern bank is a far different picture of undulating hills, with gentle slopes to the water's edge, and covered in every eligible position with an endless variety of villas, presenting every phase of artistic taste and the development of abundant wealth. These summer homes upon the Hudson are among the crowning glories of the ever-changing river scene. Here is the famous Font Hill, now the Convent of Mount St. Vincent. In 1850 the tragedian Edwin Forrest built it for his home, a mediæval graystone castle, with moat and drawbridge and six battlemented towers; but he held it only a few years, when he quarrelled with his wife, and sold the estate for $100,000 to the Sisters of Charity of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul for their Mother House, which had to remove from the site of Central Park in New York. The cross now surmounts the tallest castle tower, and it is surrounded by noble trees which have grown higher than the turrets, while on the hill behind, and almost overshadowing the little castle, is a huge red-brick convent building. Lawns slope down to the shore, and there are superb river views, with the grand wall of the Palisades rising high in front.

Yonkers is seventeen miles above New York, a galaxy of castellated and ornamental mansions fringing the town about, upon the amphitheatre of hills surrounding the flat depression on which it is mainly built. The little Neperhan or Sawmill River pours down a series of rapids through it before reaching the Hudson, with factories bordering the banks, while the great Vanderbilt railway, the New York Central, with a half-dozen sets of rails, runs along the front of the town. Here are now forty thousand people, in sharp contrast with the time when Hendrick Hudson, exploring the river, anchored in front of the little Indian village of Napperhamok, or the "Rapid Water." Curiosity brought them out in canoes to examine his ship, the "Half Moon," and he bought oysters and beans, saying he found them "a loving people who attained great age." The Dutch early bought land from these Indians for a settlement, and it became the domain of Patroon Vanderdonck, who set the town going under the name of Yonk-heer, or the "young master," meaning the heir of the family. Then the English came along and it became the "Philipse Manor," the old stone manor house built in 1682 being the antiquarian attraction, and used now as a sort of City Hall, a Soldiers' Monument standing in front. This was a manor of twenty-four thousand acres stretching along the river from Spuyten Duyvel up to the Croton. The third of the English lords of the manor was Fredericke Philipse, who was a shrewd aristocrat, and during the Revolution tried the difficult political game of a neutral, desirous of keeping on the winning side. But neither party trusted him, and although Washington had been his guest in the famous old manor house, yet he was attainted of treason by the State of New York, his great manor confiscated, cut up into small tracts and sold. The romance of Yonkers is the love story of his daughter, Mary Philipse, the "belle of the Hudson Valley." Tradition tells of her as the first love of Washington, but he wooed in vain, and she married another. Cooper made her the heroine of his novel The Spy.

The lands of this manor are among the most prized locations on the Hudson. Magnificent estates cover the sloping eastern bank, with hundreds of villas of all kinds and styles, fortunes being expended upon their elaborate decoration. Highly ornamental grounds upon the hillsides and terraces surround costly houses, built to reproduce palaces, churches, castles, baronial halls and old manors, with some sombre buildings not unlike tombs. There is every conceivable structure the florid imagination of an architect can fashion into a dwelling, some being of great size. They show up prettily among the trees, and some are thrust out upon crags almost overhanging the river, others nestle far back in clefts, and still others are set high upon the slopes. Amid the grand display is the villa-environed and exclusive town of Hastings-on-the-Hudson; and a mile above, and still in the gilded colony, is the village of Dobbs's Ferry. It got its name from the venerable John Dobbs, a Swede, who came over from the Delaware River to run the ferry during the Revolution. Not long ago some of the modern aristocrats of the place got ashamed of their old Dobbs heritage and sought to change the name to Paulding. Then came a sharp controversy, fanned into fever heat by the sensational warriors of the New York newspapers. Soon, however, the Pauldingites surrendered, old Dobbs was vindicated, and Dobbs's Ferry the place remains. It was here in the Livingston Mansion, in 1783, that Generals Washington, Carleton and Clinton met to finally settle the terms of English recognition of American independence. Two miles above is Irvington, with more elaborate villas. This favored region of the Hudson is the choicest abiding-place of the New York multi-millionaires, and a newspaper scribe on one occasion counted in the space of six miles above Hastings the rural homes of sixty-three men whose aggregate wealth was estimated at more than $500,000,000. The single million fellow no longer cuts a figure in such a galaxy. On an eminence near Irvington stood the country house of the wealthiest of them, loftily situated, a white stone building with a tall tower, having very attractive surroundings. This was the Paulding Manor of Lyndehurst, the home of Jay Gould.

THE TAPPEN ZEE.

Over opposite, the grand terminating buttress of the Palisades, Piermont, compresses the river channel, the rocks then receding, so that to the northward it broadens into the beautiful lake of the Tappan Zee. Here is the boundary dividing New Jersey from New York, and the long ridge, retiring from the river, stretches inland some miles, encircles the town of Nyack, and comes back to the river some distance above in an abrupt elevated cliff known as Point-no-Point. This lake is over four miles wide, and is the scene of the legend of "The Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee." Irving tells us that often in the still twilight of a summer evening, when the sea would be as glass, and the opposite hills threw their shadows half across it, a low sound would be heard, as of the steady vigorous pull of oars, though no boat could be seen. Some said it was a whale-boat of the ancient water-guard, sunk by the British ships during the war, but now permitted to haunt its old cruising-grounds. But the prevalent opinion connected it with the awful fate of "Rambout Van Dam of graceless memory." He was a roystering Dutchman of Spuyten Duyvel, who in a time long past navigated his boat alone one Saturday the whole length of the Tappan Zee to attend a quilting-party at Kakiat, on the western shore. Here he danced until midnight, when he started home. He was warned it was the verge of Sunday morning, but he went off, swearing he would not land until he reached Spuyten Duyvel, if it took him a month of Sundays. He was never seen afterwards, but may still be heard, plying his oars, being "the Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee, doomed to ply between Kakiat and Spuyten Duyvel until the day of judgment." There is also another legend of a stout, round, Dutch-built vessel of the olden time, with high bow and stern, sailing up New York harbor in the teeth of wind and tide. She never returned down the Hudson, but the Dutch skippers plying the river often saw her, sometimes along the Palisades, or off Croton Point, or in the Highlands, but never above them. Sometimes it was by the lightning flashes of a storm upon a pitchy night, and giving glimpses of her careering across the Tappan Zee or the wide waste of Haverstraw Bay. Sometimes on quiet moonlight nights she would lie under a high bluff in the Highlands, all in deep shadow, excepting her topsails glittering in the moonbeams. She appeared always just before or after or during unruly weather, and all the skippers knew her as the "Storm Ship." Some maintained this phantom was the "Flying Dutchman," come from the Cape of Good Hope into more tranquil waters. Others held it to be Hendrick Hudson and the shadowy crew of the "Half Moon" sailing to their revels in the Catskills. We are told by Irving that "she still haunts the Highlands and cruises about Point-no-Point. People living along the river insist they sometimes see her in summer moonlight, and that in a deep still midnight they have heard the chant of her crew as if heaving the lead."

Tappan Village, naming the Tappan Zee, is some distance back from Piermont. Over on the eastern bank, nearly opposite Nyack, is Tarrytown, the "Torwen-Dorp" or "Wheat-Town" of the ancient Dutch, which has gradually changed to the present name. The genial Irving, never at a loss for a reason for the names of places along the river, tells how the good housewives named it Tarrytown because of their spouses' propensity to linger in the village tavern on market days. It is now one of the most elegant places on the Hudson, notable for its splendid villas. The attractive region about the Tappan Zee is full of Revolutionary memories, and particularly of the great historic tragedy made by the treason of Arnold and the capture of André. Major John André, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1780, was Adjutant General of the British Army, then commanded by Sir Henry Clinton in New York. On September 20th André came to Dobbs's Ferry to meet Arnold, with whom he had been in secret correspondence in reference to the surrender of West Point, where Arnold commanded. The next night he met Arnold at Stony Point, just below the Highlands, and started back with Arnold's passport and documents enabling the British to so direct an attack upon West Point as to capture it. These papers were in Arnold's handwriting, and at his suggestion André concealed them between the soles of his feet and his stockings. André tried to make his way down the eastern side of the Hudson to New York in disguise, taking the Tarrytown road, through what was then known as the "neutral ground," which was overrun by marauders from both armies. When within a half-mile of Tarrytown, at a little stream since called André's Brook, he was captured by Paulding, Williams and Van Wert, three American scouts, whom he mistook for his own partisans, and they searched him and found the treasonable papers. Rejecting all bribes, they took him across the Hudson to Tappan, then the American army headquarters, where he was condemned and hanged as a spy on October 2d. The old house wherein he was imprisoned still stands in Tappan, and his remains were interred there until 1821, when they were conveyed to Westminster Abbey, London.

THE HOME OF WASHINGTON IRVING.

Near Irvington is Sunnyside, long the home of the famous and genial Washington Irving. In the early days this house was built by a cynical Dutch councillor named Wolfert Acker, who inscribed over the door, "Lust in Rust,"—meaning "pleasure in quiet,"—whence the English called it "Wolfert's Roost." As the Spanish Escurial had been modelled after the famous gridiron of the blessed Saint Lawrence, so this loyal councillor is said to have modelled his house after the cocked hat of the doughty Dutch Governor, Peter the Headstrong. The old house with its quaint Dutch gables became in time the castle of Baltus Van Tassel, and being held by Jacob Van Tassel, an active American partisan during the Revolution, the British sacked and burned it. The eastern front is overrun by ivy given Irving by Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, and originally from Melrose Abbey. The great author lived here from 1846 until his death in 1859, and his pen has immortalized the neighborhood. Nearby is the sequestered vale of Slaeperigh Haven, famed in the "Legend of the Sleepy Hollow." Not far from Tarrytown, he writes, there is a little valley, or rather a lap of land among high hills, one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquility. At the opening of this hollow, by the side of a winding lane, stands the ancient Dutch church, which is the oldest religious house in New York State. It is a curious little building with a diminutive spire enclosing a bell with the inscription, "Si . Deus . Pro . Nobis . Contra . Nos . 1685"—If God for us, who against us. It was built of bricks brought out from Holland, and in the ancient and mossy graveyard, almost under the shadow of the old church, Irving is buried. He lies upon a beautiful sunny slope, whence one can look into the Sleepy Hollow, and also far over the lovely Tappan Zee and its pleasant surroundings, a spot he selected for his tomb. Longfellow thus sweetly sings of this modest grave:

"Here lies the gentle humorist, who died

In the bright Indian Summer of his fame

A simple stone, with but a date and name,

Marks his secluded resting place, beside

The river that he loved and glorified.

Here in the autumn of his days he came,

But the dry leaves of his life were all aflame

With tints that brightened and were multiplied.

How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!

Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,

Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;

Dying, to leave a memory like the breath

Of summer, full of sunshine and of showers,

A grief and gladness in the atmosphere."

Only a short distance from the church is the old bridge made famous in the legend describing the escapade of the schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, with his "soft and foolish heart toward the sex." In his love he had a rival in the stalwart and muscular Brom Bones. The legend tells us that Ichabod taught the Dutch urchins of these parts, and at the same time paid court to old farmer Van Tassel's daughter, the fair Katrina. Brom Bones, otherwise Brom Van Brunt, determined to drive him away. One dismal night Ichabod left the Van Tassel mansion in very low spirits. In the hush of midnight he could hear the watchdog bark, distant and vague, from the far opposite shore of the Hudson. Irving tells us a belief existed in a spectre—the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—supposed to be the spirit of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried off by a cannon-ball. Nearing the old church, this horrid ghost appeared in pursuit of Ichabod, who was bestride an inflexible old horse called Gunpowder. The terrified schoolmaster made all haste to reach the bridge, having passed which, he would be beyond the power of his pursuer. He spurred Gunpowder forward, but looking back, beheld the spectre close behind him, and in the very act of hurling its horrid head at him. The crash came; Ichabod rolled to the ground; the spectre and Gunpowder rushed past him in a whirlwind. Next day, we are told, a shattered pumpkin was found in the road, and not long afterwards Brom Bones led Katrina to the altar, but the luckless Ichabod was never heard of again.

In the hills behind Point-no-Point, on the western verge of the Tappan Zee, at one hundred and sixty feet elevation, is Rockland Lake, a crystal sheet of water which gives New York much of its ice supply, the blocks being sent from the top of the hill on a long slide to the barges that carry it down the river. As they glide along, they look in the distance, under the sunlight, like a string of diamonds. Hook Mountain, separating the lake from the river, is over six hundred feet high, and out of the lake flows the Hackensack River behind the Palisades, through the Jersey meadows to Newark Bay. Just above Tarrytown, on the eastern shore, is Sing-Sing Village, on a pretty slope, the name coming from the Indian Ossining, meaning "a stony place." Here, just back from the shore, is the famous Sing-Sing Prison, the long, low tiers of white stone buildings having the railway tunnelled through them, and the pleasant village rising on the hillside behind. The convicts built their own prison many years ago, with stone hewn out of an adjacent marble ridge, called Mount Pleasant. Just above, the long forest-covered projection of Teller's or Croton Point, thrust for two miles, or more than half-way across the broad river, from the eastern bank, makes the northern boundary of the Tappan Zee. The West Shore railway, which has come up through the Hackensack Valley from Jersey City, emerges high on the western hills and runs gradually down to the river bank, so that the Hudson above has a railway on either shore. Alongside the Point, the Croton River flows in, the Reservoir being about six miles up that stream. It was off Teller's Point the British sloop "Vulture" anchored, when she brought André up from New York for his interview with Arnold.

ENTERING THE HIGHLANDS.

Beyond Teller's Point is another broadened expanse of the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay, spreading in parts five miles wide, its western shore lined with brickmaking establishments, lime-kilns and the factories which break up the stone quarried in the neighboring hills into Belgian blocks for New York street paving. Far in front, over the spacious bay, looms up the distant range of Hudson River Highlands, an outcrop of the great Kittatinny ridge, stretching broadly across the country, a part of the same deep blue-gray mountain wall we have already penetrated farther south. Its changing hues and appearance, as approached, remind of Campbell's couplet in the Pleasures of Hope:

"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,

And robes the mountain in its azure hue."