was at hand. Every church in Europe, from the grandest cathedral to the humblest chapel, resounded with supplications, and in the province of New York a day of fasting and humiliation was appointed, in order that the wrath of God might be assuaged. Let us take a brief survey of the little city on Manhattan Island, upon which Newton's comet looked down, while Dominie Nieu-. wenhuysen and Dominie Frazius were busy with prayers to avert the direful omen. To a visitor sailing up the harbour the most conspicuous objects would have been Fort James, standing on the present Battery and Fort James. mounting forty-seven guns, and a little to the west of it the principal town windmill.1 On the other side, near the present South Ferry, scarcely less conspicuous, was the stone Government House, built by Stuyvesant, the name of which was afterward changed by Governor Dongan to Whitehall. Hard by was the governor's dwelling-house. Going up Whitehall Street, one would espy the warehouse and bakery that had once belonged to the West India Company, and the brewery, convenient for governor and dominie. Near it stood the Dutch parsonage with its quaint flowerbeds gorgeous in colours and bordered with closely trimmed box. Coming to the Bowling Green, the belfrey of Kieft's church of St. Nicholas would be seen peering over the walls of the fort at the 1 This description partly follows the map of "The Towne of Mannados, or New Amsterdam, in 1661," of which the original is in the British Museum. graveyard on the west side of Broadway. Just north of the wall stood the town pump. Stepping back to Whitehall and turning eastward, we come upon the jail and the stocks. Pearl Street, the oldest in the city, was then the river bank, and was often called Waterside or the Strand, but the old name has prevailed, which is said to have been given it from the abundant heaps of oystershells, highly prized for the excellence of their lime. The quaint Dutch houses, with their gables and weathercocks and small-paned dormer windows, were built of bricks baked in Holland, cemented with mortar made from this lime. They retained the high stoop (stoep, i. e. steps), which in the Fatherland raised the best rooms above the risk of inundation, and thus bequeathed to modern New York one of its most distinctive architectural features. From Pearl Street in a gentle curve ran northward to the city wall a street most suggestive of Holland, with a stream flowing through its centre diked on both sides like a Dutch canal. This was rightly called Broad Street, for it was seventy-two feet in width. Its canal was spanned Broad Street. by several wooden foot-bridges and one "for cattell and waggons." At about the time which our narrative has reached, Governor. Andros had the canal effaced and the road built solidly over it, and from that day to this the stream has continued to flow under Broad Street, doing duty as a sewer.1 Two spacious docks were then built 1 Hill and Waring, Old Wells and Water-Courses of the Island of Manhattan, p. 310. at the foot of the street, between the jail and Whitehall, which greatly increased the facilities for shipping. Walking up Pearl Street as far as the present No. 73, opposite Coenties Slip, one would come upon the old Stadt Huys, which served as a city hall until 1699, when a new one was built on Wall Street, facing the head of Broad. In that new City Hall the eccentric Charles Lee spent the year 1777 as a prisoner, and on its balcony in 1789, the object of his jealous hatred, George Washington, was inaugurated President of the United States. Where Pearl Street crossed Wall, there was the Water Gate through the tall palisadoed structure. A little below, the burgher's battery of ten guns frowned upon the river; just at the gate The Water was a demi-lune called the Fly (V'lei) Gate. blockhouse; and a short distance above stood the slaughter-houses, which Andros had banished from the city. Proceeding northward, we enter a bright green marshy valley drained by a brook, where groups of laughing women might be seen washing clothes, as one often sees them to-day in France. The brook and the verdure have long since departed, but the brookside path still keeps Maiden the name of Maiden Lane. On the East River, at the foot of this smith's forge, from which the valley is known as Smit's Vallei, shortened in common parlance to V'lei. A few steps above the smithery bring us to the site of Peck Slip, where a boat is moored to a tree growing on the bank. A horn hangs upon this tree, and if we take it down and blow, a VOL. II. path, is a Lane. busy black |