raph. When Samuel F.B. Morse built the first
telegraph line to Philadelphia, he had it strung across the river from
Fort Lee to the basement of Audubon's house, and there he received the
first telegraphic message ever sent to the island of Manhattan. Here
Audubon lived, wrote, and painted until even his rugged strength was
worn out. He worked until those clever ambidextrous hands lost the
cunning to work out the forms his active brain could still conceive.
The day came, in 1851, when he died, fortunately before any great
change had come over the beauties of Minniesland. The peacefulness of
Trinity Cemetery, which takes in part of the Audubon farm, is still
faintly reminiscent of the scene of the ornithologist's later life,
and there, close by the old house, is the grave of Audubon, and upon
his tomb are sculptured the birds he loved so well, now keeping watch
over him.

[Illustration: Clement C. Moore's House

Chelsea]

While Audubon worked in his out-of-town retreat, another scholar and
writer lived farther down the island towards the city. Clement C.
Moore lived in a little district of his own called Chelsea Village,
now merged into the city by so deft a laying out of streets that there
is little irregularity at the point where town and village met. A bit
of the old village remains exactly as it was in the General
Theological Seminary, and the block on which it stands, Twentieth to
Twenty-first streets, Ninth and Tenth avenues, is still called Chelsea
Square. Clement C. Moore inherited from his father, Bishop Benjamin
Moore, a large tract of land along the river near the present Chelsea
Square, and gave the land on which the seminary was built to that
institution. He himself lived in a house which his father had occupied
before him and which stood on the line of the present Twenty-third
Street on the block between Ninth and Tenth avenues. It was a very old
building, renowned for the fact that General Washington had stopped
there one afternoon when he had his headquarters in the city. Clement
C. Moore was a professor in the General Theological Seminary, and
while there compiled the first Greek and Hebrew lexicons ever
published in this country. But it is not by reason of his learned
books or his philanthropy that his name is best recalled, but by a
poem which he wrote for his children and of which the world at large
might never have known but that it was sent without his knowledge and
published in an up-State paper