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1884.] the eaves, the same ample staircase, halls, and rooms, the same delicate detail in wood outside and in wood and plaster within. These things indicate that the houses were built between 1790 and 1800, and were therefore recent but by no means brand-new when they excited the admiration of the comic historian in 1809.

For the sake of the good Knickerbocker, and for their own, these edifices are worth making a note of now; the more because they are so evidently doomed. Nothing, indeed, has kept them standing hitherto except the widening of the island just here, which makes their site less easily accessible from the elevated roads and thus preserves it for the time from the demand for speculative building. They are urban now. When they were built, they were rather rural than suburban, seven miles from the Battery, by uncertain sloop or by the rough country roads, being practically

farther than the houses twenty-five miles from Wall Street in which so many business-men of New York now find it feasible to reside.

Scarcely any place in New Jersey contains much that carries us back to the time before that name was given to it by its English sponsors, except the water-front immediately opposite New York. The old order, indeed, survives in the name of Orange, but in nothing visible about that expanding community, nor indeed in many authentic documents relating to it. Though the name survives only in a modern suburb, it was a favorite name with the Dutch. It was still current as another name for Albany in the time of Irving, who presents "Fort Oranje" phonetically as "Fort Aurania," while even now that so much research has been expended upon the early history of New York, few people who are not specialists seem to know that Manhattan itself was once officially known as New Orange. It was so baptized by the Dutch admirals who