VER

VERY rural and tranquil is the vicinity of Spuyten Duyvel Creek, at the head of the island of Manhattan. Standing on the bridge here, it is difficult to realize the fact that one is within three hours' walk of a great city. The din of it, and the smoke, and the smells, are shut out from this quiet valley by the intervening ridge of Washington Heights. But to and fro on the blue Hudson go the toiling steamers and the white-sailed river craft, linking the gazer to the city by their commercial associations. The inhabitants near this bridge appear to be unsophisticated and primitive in their ways, but they are only superficially so. They dredge their own oysters, which lends an air of selfsupport and independence to the place; but then they charge New York prices for them, which shows that with them rural simplicity is but skin-deep. One of the two boys who sit there on the stone-faced bank of the creek, fishing, has no clothes on, which heightens the idea of the primitive, certainly; but then the other wears the traditional red shirt of the New York rowdy, and his expletives just now, when he acciden

tally baited his hook with his ear, were couched in the choicest profanity of Mackerelville. A rustic damsel comes tripping along a lane that leads to the main road. She is not so rustic on a near view. In size and shape her chignon resembles a two-hundred pound conical shell. She wears enormous red ear-rings, and her broad, serviceable feet are bursting through tancolored French boots. Disgusted with the inconsistencies of the place, I leave it, and, turning cityward, take the road that leads by Washington Heights to New York.

This is the most picturesque route to the city from the land side. It winds past villas that stand on sloping lawns, or, like amateur Rhenish castles, frown from lofty peaks down upon the unresenting river. Evidences of wealth and culture meet the eye everywhere. Gate lodges give an air of European aristocracy to the locality. There is a feudal atmosphere about the place; one can, with due confusion of associations, almost fancy the curfew tolling here at nightfall, from the campanile that crowns yon lofty knoll; though it is

not so easy to conceive that the serfs who dwell hereabouts would extinguish their lamps at its bidding. Trim hedges of beautiful flowering shrubs border the gravel-walks that lead from the road to the villas. Cows of European lineage crop the velvet turf in the glades of the copses. Now and then the river is shut out from view, but only to appear again in scenic vistas, with glimpses of the white villages on the New Jersey shore beyond. But the road becomes less and less rural as it leaves the heights and stretches along the more level ground on its way to the city. Soon it assumes the air of a village street. Indeed, it passes through several villages in its course; and of these it would not be easy to say where any one of them begins and ends, so linked together are they all by a chain of heterogeneous houses. This is a subject on which to be reserved, however, because it might not be safe to confound an inhabitant of Carmansville with one of Manhattanville. It is ever so with "villes." They have conflicting interests and sectional jealousies to keep their borders in a blaze. Who, for instance, could imagine a neighborly feeling between some Temperanceville and the Toddyville that jostles its elbow? Bloomingdale is before us, and from this village the road takes its name, -a name suggestive of buxom damsels and spring blossoms. Bloomingdale is the village nearest to the city, but its surroundings are rural as yet. The banks on either hand are well shaded with trees. Country churches lift their towers at intervals. Large asylums loom up through the old trees, asylums in which lunatics are cared for, and asylums for orphan children. There are old family mansions that stand away off the road in grounds, places with more or less family romance in their history no doubt; and huge sign boards over the gateways of some of these inform us that they have been debased into public gardens, where people congregate in the summer time to smoke and drink beer. Now the chirping of English sparrows is heard on every side,

and small flocks of these insolent birds are seen foraging in the dust of the road, or clustering like brown blossoms on the hibiscus-bushes and other low shrubs that skirt it. It is hardly five years since a few dozen of these birds were imported for Central Park. Within two or three years they increased prodigiously, spreading first over the bosky grounds of the villas along the Bloomingdale Road. Thence they found their way townward,- for the sparrow is essentially a bird about town. Now the eaves of up-town houses are musical with their chirps, and most of the city parks are swarming with them. Calling them English sparrows, I ask some question concerning them of a burly policeman who is patrolling here. At once his brow contracts, and he avers, in the mellifluous accent of seagreen Erin, that there ain't no English sparrows here, and folks would n't have 'em; that they are Irish sparrows, descendants of the original ones let loose in Central Park, which, I think he stated, vacated their native egg-shells somewhere in the vicinity of Cork.

The Bloomingdale Road is a continuation of Broadway, taking its rural name at the point where the great city thoroughfare touches the southwestern angle of Central Park. It is Broadway run out into the country, in fact, to enjoy a breath of fresh air. Right under the steep, woody bank that slopes to the west from this road runs the Hudson River Railway, and much of the intervening ground is occupied by market-gardens. So is much of the tract lying between the road and Central Park to the east. It is a bright, balmy October day as I pass by these plots, and the odor of fragrant pot-herbs gives a zest to the air. But the dust will soon be stirred up now, for the fast trottinghorse man is the figure that gives life and movement to the Bloomingdale Road, and people of his tribe are already beginning to whirl past. A fat livery-stable keeper in a spider wagon, drawn by a span of strawberry horses, rushes by tugging upon his nags at arms' length. A sporting butcher in a

sulky is on his track. He ejaculates "Hi! hi!" to his cream-colored pony, and as he does so his teeth gleam like those of a leopard under the cruel curve that he gives to his black-bristled upper lip. Here, at a more leisurely pace, comes a swell, driving tandem with a team of blood bays. Probably he is a gold broker, or a successful gambler in some other branch of the profession. He drives an English sporting "trap," on the hind seat of which his groom insecurely sits, and, somewhat ignominiously, faces to the rear. Superb, nevertheless, is this young man, in his claret-colored livery with huge metal buttons, his knee-breeches and topboots, and his shiny hat with a cockade on it. Later in the afternoon the road will be crowded with teams, from the one-horse buggy to the heavy drag driven four-in-hand, - most of them come over from the Park on their way by the Bloomingdale to the Kingsbridge Road.

Nearing the city, the aspect of the scene changes, and changes much for the worse. The market-gardens are smaller now, and many of them lie deep down in hollows, the roofs of the small dwellings that stand in them sometimes being on a level with the road. To the left are seen the rocky knolls of Central Park. Tall, narrow houses lift their heads singly, at intervals, along the streets that bound the Park, blinking right and left with their wistful windows, as if looking out for the advent of other buildings destined to stand shoulder to shoulder with them in the future. The masses of gray rock to the south of the Park, just where the city begins, are very populous. Log shanties, or shanties made of rough boards, crown every boulder, or stick their stove-pipe chimneys out of clefts in the rock. Some of them have their weather-gables and roofs covered with sheets of rusty iron. Lean and hungry dogs, most of them large-sized, but undistinguishable as to breed, roam about the purlieus. Goats enhance the sub-Alpine effect of the place; but it would re

quire some stretch of imagination to make the whitewashed hut on the summit of yon rock a Swiss châlet, and the rag-picker who has just emerged from it a chamois-hunter going forth to stalk the familiar kids that cluster on the neighboring peaks. Small children, fluttering with rags, and booted with black mud, riot and tumble everywhere among these free crags. Their parents are mostly away in the city, roaming among the ash-barrels and garbageboxes, out of the depths of which they make their living by hook and by crook. Soon this little colony of half-savages on the rocks will have lapsed into the past. Blasting-powder is already making havoc in the vicinity, and grand mansions with their appurtenances will erelong cover the ground over which this curious hamlet of squatters is now scattered.

er.

Down to the right now I take my way, where the railway track runs close by the wharfage along the Hudson RivThe country begins to merge into the city here, and there is not much of the rural to be seen. A remnant of it may be discerned, however, about some old mansions that stand between the railway and the river. They are surrounded with gardens, and closely shaded with ancient trees. The old box-bushes in the gardens are yet kept trimmed into formal blocks of dark verdure. Gentility of an old-fashioned kind marks these last connecting links between the country and the city, and there is a suggestion about them of former opulence and family pride. Once, as I walked in a bit of dark and damp woodland that runs from the rear of one of these houses down to the beach of the river, I came upon an old weatherstained stone lion, grasping with one paw a stone globe. This might have been the heraldic device of one of the early lords of the soil. Possibly it might have done duty in former days as a guardian at the vestibule of some older mansion than the one that now stands there; and its appearance, as it lay among the dank herbage of the grove, greatly heightened the sense of

Wealth and poverty, enterprise and squalor, clutch at and jostle each other now, as the road gathers itself for its plunge into the city. Columns of tawny smoke rise upward from the huge chimneys of the factories that abound in this district. Every board of the rough fences along the roadside is used as an advertising medium, and so is every bit of rock that crops up from the barren soil. Superscriptions, in great black or white letters, apprise the world of balms, bitters, baby-jumpers, and a hundred other indispensable things in the way of panaceas and labor-saving inventions. Here, just on the margin of the river, is a field strewn with great blocks of brown stone, out of which many stone-cutters are shaping columns and cornices destined to increase the gloom of an architecture that is already sombre to excess. It must be in brown-studies that the architects of New York work out their designs. A grassy road leads down to the river and at the foot of it some small pleasure-boats are moored; but the place is lonely and still, and no sound is heard save the clink of the stone-cutters' tools, and the steam-whistles of the tug-boats that puff by each other on the river. Passing on along the front, one is led to reflect on the character of the successive streets that run down to the river. The gradual demoralization of these streets, as they near the manufacturing district, is grievous to the observer. Here is one with which I am well acquainted at points near the central ridge of the city, and in the vicinity of the fashionable avenues. It runs between blocks of stately brown-stone houses there, and is of a deportment at once gracious and reserved. In this locality its associations are of the lowest. The block of houses on the right-hand side, as I follow it toward the river, is of brick; and the houses are lofty, conweying the impression that the speculator who built them might have been subject to delirious visions of a future

district. A more dismal spectacle than these old rattle-trap tenements now present it would be difficult to conceive. The shattered blinds dangle half off their hinges from the windows, threatening destruction to the wayfarer who treads the unswept sidewalk below. Most of these houses have low barrooms on their ground-floors, with cheap restaurants or oyster-cribs attached. Here and there a few small and meanly appointed shops are to be seen, where miscellaneous goods, ranging from tape to tallow candles, are displayed for sale. The doors of nearly all the houses stand open, revealing dirty, gloomy hall-ways with rickety stairs leading to the upper floors. From many of the windows above pop forth the heads of women and children; for the houses are tenements, with several families dwelling on each floor. Opposite to this depressing row, the whole length of the block is occupied by an immense gas-work concern, the smoke and coal-dust from which begrime all things around; near this are a station for horse-cars of what is called the "cross-town line," and a wharf from which ferry-boats ply to Weehawken on the New Jersey side. This ferry is not a pleasant one for passengers who cherish prejudice in favor of quiet lives. From Weehawken the boats come generally loaded with cattle of obstreperous New Jersey breeds. Weehawken, for all its romantic name, is nothing but a huddle of low drinking - shops, to which roughs and robbers of the worst class resort from the city. Respectable persons who are rash enough to venture across the river by this route are liable to be maltreated and robbed during the trip,-instances of this kind having more than once occurred.

The explorer who extends his investigations to the edge of the river here will now and then discover that his footsteps have not fallen in pleasant places. At times warning whiffs are wafted to him from some huge wooden abattoir, urging him to pass on, nor