and Testaments
which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound
volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of
patient and persistent handling.

[Illustration: Stuyvesant's "Whitehall"]

The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on
the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep
Pasture,--the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad
Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort
at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was
called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the
road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two
hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand
to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the
waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a
tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall
of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard,
near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and so on to
the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept.

[Illustration: THE STADT HUYS.]

[Illustration: Along the Strand]

Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet
walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even
now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so
short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business
section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity
come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight,
while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered
warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden
of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was Hoogh
Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it
was the first street to be paved with stone.

In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping town,
the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses--the first verses
ever penned in the colony, and called variously _The Praise of New
Netherland_, _The Complaint of New Amsterdam_, _The Thistle Finch_,
and others. Although these suggested true affection for the land of
his adoption, it was the home of his youth and the never-fading
remembrance of his childhood's days that haunted him and called to
him.