Island--Newspapers in the Thirties--Early Day Marriages--The
Knickerbocker Sabbath--Home Customs--Restaurants and Hotels--The
Leather-heads--Conditions of Travel--Stage-coaches and Steamers--The
Clipper Ships--When Dickens First Came.

Boughton, had you bid me chant
Hymns to Peter Stuyvesant.
Had you bid me sing of Wouter.
(He! the Onion-head! the Doubter!)
But to rhyme of this one-mocker,
Who shall rhyme to Knickerbocker?
--_Austin Dobson_.


Before the writer, as he begins the pleasant task, is an old
half-illegible map, or rather, fragment of a map. Near-by are three or
four dull prints. They are of a hundred years ago, or thereabouts, and
tell of a New York when President Monroe was in the White House, and
Governor De Witt Clinton in the State Capitol, at Albany, and Mayor
Colden in the City Hall. To pore over them is to achieve a certain
contentment of the soul. Probably it held itself to be turbulent in
its day--that old New York. Without doubt it had its squabbles, its
turmoils, its excitements. We smile at the old town--its limitations,
its inconveniences, its _naïvetés_. But perhaps, in these years of
storm, and stress, and heartache, we envy more than a little. It is not
merely the architectural story that the old maps, prints, diaries tell;
in them we can find an age that is gone, catch fleeting glimpses of
people long since dust to dust, look at past manners, fashions,
pleasures and contrast them with our own.