logo G.P. Putnam’s Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1903 Copyright , 1903 BY CHARLES HEMSTREET Published, November, 1903 The Knickerbocker Press, New York The Half Moon The “Half-Moon” on the Hudson— 1609. From the painting by L.W. Seavey ....

Seal of New Amsterdam T HERE is a fashion nowadays of trimming the fronts of brick houses by placing black bricks among the red in such a way as to form odd and unique designs. It is an attractive way of doing, for it varies the staid simplicity of the solid color. But for all it may seem original and new, it is a style that had its beginning long, long ago, even in the days when the stern Peter Stuyvesant governed with an iron hand over the Dutch colony of fifteen hundred people, the town that

W HEN William Bradford came to New York, in 1693, the town had grown so large that it must needs have a night-watch—four men who each carried a lantern, and who, strolling through the quiet streets, proclaimed at the start of each hour that the weather was fair, or that the weather was foul, and told beside that all was as well as it should be in those nightly hours. More than this, the town went a step farther towards the making of a metropolis, and lit the streets by night (whether for the ben

I N the far down-town business section of New York, there is a street so short that you can walk its entire length in ten minutes or less time. It leads from the park where the City Hall is, straight to the river. Beginning at the tall buildings where the newspapers have their homes, it continues along between the warehouses of leather merchants and the solid stonework of the bridge that crosses from the Manhattan to the Brooklyn shore; leads to the open space at the top of Cherry Hill, then mak

W HEN the eighteenth century was within two years of its close, a group of men, perhaps half a dozen in all, made up the writers of New York. The city then lay between the park (a name that had just been bestowed upon the Common of old) and the Battery; with Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the town, sending out tendrils of narrow streets to tangle and turn about themselves in such persistent fashion that they were never to be straightened out. Quite abruptly, where the park began, Broadway dw

S TRETCHING from Broadway towards the east, starting from the ivy-covered walls of the Chapel of St. Paul—here lay the scenes of Washington Irving's childhood. Golden Hill was the name given to this district, long before Irving was born; called so because of its golden appearance in the autumn days. It was a wondrously beautiful place, and set squarely upon the hill-top was an inn that, in the days of the Revolution, came to be a meeting-place for patriots. Even now, when the glories of Golden H

I N the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in the middle of the st

I N that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this half-century,—in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the attention of an observant passer-by. A brick building, its architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness—a condition little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of ground calls for compactness regardles

W HEN New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well within bounds on the lower part of the island of Manhattan, long before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump over a stream and go wandering up the mainland, overleap a river and go spreading over another island to the sea,—long before the time when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several directions on the island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country land beyond, several tiny villag

A BUSTLING, energetic, but provincial city was New York between the years 1830 and 1840, the last days of the Knickerbockers. After 1840 it changed greatly, speeding rapidly on in the making of a metropolis. Looking back now it is plain that the progress of enlargement went steadily on year by year, but then the changes came on imperceptibly enough. To any one who knows the great metropolis of this twentieth century, it will seem remarkable that Hanover Square was the place where merchants and j

L IKE many a landed estate, like many a quiet village, like many a battle-ground, like many a winding and historic road, like so many other places of interest of which the island of Manhattan has been the scene in days agone—Minniesland is not easy to locate. Relentlessly and remorselessly the great masses of brick and mortar have forged ahead in their furtherance of the city's growth, seeking a level as they spread, dominating the island, levelling the hills, and stretching over valleys until t

L OOKING backward to the days before the Civil War is to bring into review a host of men who then walked through the city in which time has wrought so many changes, and to bring to the mind's eye familiar streets, but so altered that they seem like unknown highways. There was the Battery, with its old-time appearance, when the green grass of summer was not cast into deep and continual shade by an overhanging device of modern travel, and when its broad walk was a promenade, the like and popularit

T HERE is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York to-day, where buildings are too towering, too massive, too thickly clustered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace surroundings with more than passing interest. In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many reminders of those friends whose books are on th

Browning, Poet and Man A Survey. By Elisabeth Luther Cary , author of "The Rossettis," "William Morris," etc. 8 o . With 25 illustrations in photogravure and some text illustrations. Net, $3.50. LIBRARY EDITION. With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations in half-tone. $2.50. "It is written with taste and judgment.... The book is exactly what it ought to be, and will lead many to an appreciation of Browning who have hitherto looked at the bulk of his writings with disgust.... It is beaut

By Elisabeth Luther Cary , author of "The Rossettis," "Robert Browning," "Tennyson," etc. 8 o . Fully illustrated, uniform with "The Rossettis," "Browning," etc. Net, $3.50. By mail, $3.75. William Morris, of active, varied, and interesting life, has been the subject of several biographies, written from different points of view. Nevertheless, there is need for an account that gathers together the chief facts of the life in a condensed form, and connects them with comment and criticism of an info