SHOPS AND SHOPPING.


If the stranger in New York, on any pleasant day, finds himself near
Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage he will be in the midst of a very
pretty scene. Perhaps as he reads these words and asks the question
where that romantic cot may be found, he is comfortably seated in it,
with his feet placidly reposing upon its window-sills. It is, indeed,
in a new form. It no longer looks as it did to the early citizen of
fifty years ago, driving out before breakfast upon the Bloomingdale
Road, and surveying the calm river from the seclusion of Stryker's
Bay. It had an indefinable road-side English air in those far-off
mornings. The early citizen would not have been surprised had he heard
the horn of the guard merrily winding, and beheld the mail-coach of
old England bowling up to the door. There were fields and open spaces
about it, for it was on the edge of the city that was already reaching
out upon the island. Bloomingdale! Twas a lovely name, and 'tis a
great pity that the chief association with it is that of a very dusty
road.

Meanwhile, if you will contemplate the Fifth Avenue Hotel you will see
Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage in its present form. But what a
busy, brilliant neighborhood it is now! There are shops that recall
the prettiest upon the boulevards in Paris; and the people are greatly
to be pitied who are too fine to stop and look into them. To be too
fine is to lose much. Yet what scion of the golden youth of this
moment would dare to walk by the site of Corporal Thompson's Broadway
Cottage eating an apple at three o'clock in the afternoon?