Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/728

720, and was fourteen days en route; pestilence, imported from the West India islands, depopulated the adjacent houses; water was sold from carts; and dimly lighted was the pedestrian on his midnight way, while old-fashioned watchmen cried the hour; and when, in 1807, Robert Fulton initiated steam navigation, the vast system of ferriage was established which inundated the main avenue of the city with a perpetual tributary stream of floating population from all the outlying shores of the Hudson and East Rivers, Staten and Long Islands, and the villages above Manhattan. A lady who lived in New York forty years ago, and returned this season, expressed her surprise that the matutinal procession of rustics she used to watch from the window of her fashionable domicile in the lower part of Broadway had ceased, so completely had suburban citizens usurped the farmers' old homes. The beautiful pigeons that used to coo and cluster on the cobble stones had no resting-place for their coral feet on the Russ pavement, so thickly moved the drays, and so unremitted was the rush of man and beast. In fact, the one conservative feature eloquent of the past is the churchyard,—the old, moss-grown, sloping gravestones,—landmarks of finished life-journeys, mutely invoking the hurrying crowd through the tall iron railings of Trinity and St. Paul's. It is a striking evidence of a "new country," that a youth from the Far West, on arriving in New York by sea, was so attracted by these ancient cemeteries that he lingered amid them all day,—saying it was the first time he had ever seen a human memorial more than twenty years old, except a tree! And memorable was the ceremony whereby, a few years since, the Historical Society celebrated the bicentennial birthday of Bradford, the old colonial printer, by renewing his headstone. At noonday, when the life-tide was at flood, in lovely May weather, a barrier was stretched across Broadway; and there, at the head of eager gold-worshipping Wall Street, in the heart of the bustling, trafficking crowd, a vacant place was secured in front of the grand and holy temple of Trinity. The pensive chant arose; a white band of choristers and priests came forth; and eminent citizens gathered around to reconsecrate the tablet over the dust of one who, two hundred years ago, had practised a civilizing art in this fresh land, and disseminated messages of religion and wisdom. It was a singular picture, beautiful to the eye, solemn to the feelings, and a rare tribute to the past, where the present sways with such absolute rule. Few Broadway tableaux are so worthy of artistic preservation. Before, the vista of a money-changers' mart; above and below, a long, crowded avenue of metropolitan life; behind, the lofty spire, gothic windows, and archways of the church, and the central group as picturesquely and piously suggestive as a mediæval rite.

Vainly would the most self-possessed reminiscent breast the living tide of the surging thoroughfare, on a weekday, to realize in his mind's eye its ancient aspect; but if it chance to him to land at the Battery on a clear and still Sabbath morning, and before the bells summon forth the worshippers, and to walk thence to Union Square in company with an octogenarian Knickerbocker of good memory, local pride, and fluent speech, he will obtain a mental photograph of the past that transmutes the familiar scene by a quaint and vivid aerial perspective. Then the "Middle Road" of the beginning of this century will reappear,—the traces of a wheat-field on the site of St. Paul's, still a fresh tradition; Oswego Market, opposite Liberty Street, is alive with early customers; the reminiscent beholds the apparition of Rutgers's orchard, whose remaining noble elms yet shade the green vista of the City Hospital, and which was a place for rifling bird's-nests in the boyhood of his pensive companion, whose father played at skittles on the Bowling Green, hard by the Governor's house, while the Dutch householders sat smoking long