Page:History of Hudson County and of the Old Village of Bergen.djvu/56

48 by order of the Schout and Schepens of Bergen, ratified by the Council at New Amsterdam on February 9, 1662.

If these men of 1660 had returned to Bergen a hundred years later they would have found no marvelous changes. Even in 1860 they would have found much that was unchanged, despite steamships and railroads, streets lit with gas, and busy factories. All local transport still was done with horses, there were enough cattle, sheep, pigs and goats at large to keep a pound-keeper fully occupied, the salt meadows were lively with flights of duck and snipe, and sea fish and sea turtle still were being taken in the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers, the Kill von Kull, and in Newark and New York Bays.

It was left for the period within our own generation to change the world so colossally that today those Dutch ancestors would indeed imagine themselves to be among sorcery and witchcraft. Automobiles flash where they plodded behind oxen and fat slow horses. Where the old windmill on Paulus Hook ground corn less than a hundred years ago, there stand and float implements of commerce whose use they could not comprehend. Their descendants are shot in electric trains under that North River which they ferried with labor and fear.

Most amazing of all, however, would be the tall buildings; and it would be almost impossible for them to believe that the vastly reared piles of marble and granite are not palaces of their High Mightinesses the States General of rich Holland, but simply the modern successors of their little trading posts under trees where, with scales held in the hand, they weighed furs in exchange for wampum.