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1884.]

if this were not a goodly place in which to dwell and plant vineyards. The marshes, still bare, are swathed, of an April afternoon, in swimming and luminous mist, which reduces Newark to a vague uncertainty, all but a few gaunt chimneys, and through which the masses of the Orange hills loom faintly blue. The slope of Snake Hill, nearest us, is still unplanted and unbuilt. This shining ribbon almost under us is the Hackensack, and that narrower and farther gleam the Passaic. All these were here when the Dutchman came, and it all looks very much as it must have looked then.

Nor are there wanting objects of man's handiwork to carry us back to those old times. Bergen Square is the centre of such antiquities as remain to Bergen, as it was the centre of the primitive village, which was "regularly laid out" upon the urgency of Peter Stuyvesant in 1660, according to a plan still extant and reproduced in Mr. Winfield's "History of Hudson County."