he lived to
see Lord Bellomont made Governor and riding through the streets in a
coach the gorgeousness of which astounded all; he lived to see
Captain William Kidd sail out of the harbor in the ship _Adventure
Galley_, with never a thought that a few years more would see him
executed as a pirate. And when Dominie Selyns died, bequeathing his
poems to swell the scanty literature of his times, the era of the
Dutch had well-nigh ended.

Chapter II

Before the Revolution

When William Bradford came to New York, in 1693, the town had grown so
large that it must needs have a night-watch--four men who each carried
a lantern, and who, strolling through the quiet streets, proclaimed at
the start of each hour that the weather was fair, or that the weather
was foul, and told beside that all was as well as it should be in
those nightly hours. More than this, the town went a step farther
towards the making of a metropolis, and lit the streets by night
(whether for the benefit of the night-watch or for some other the
records say not), by placing on a pole projecting from each seventh
house a lantern with a candle in it.

Pilgrims who year after year seek out the shrines that are connected
in one way or another with the literature of the city have worn a path
plain to be seen along the stone pavement about Trinity Church, a path
leading straight to a bit of greensward where, beside a gravel walk,
is the tomb of William Bradford. Although Bradford made slight
pretence of being a man of letters, he is remembered as one who loved
to foster literature. And, there being little enough left to recall
the writings of the seventeenth century, this tombstone has its many
visitors. The pilgrims who find their way to it have but half
completed their journey. If they leave the churchyard and stray on,
not going by way of crowded Wall Street, which would be the direct
course, but taking one of the more winding and narrow streets to the
south, they will come after a time to a thoroughfare where the
structure of the Elevated Road forms a bridge to convey heavy trains
that hurry past, stirring the air with constant vibration. In this
street, dark even when the sun shines brightest, is another reminder
of William Bradford,--a tablet in form, but quite as much a tombstone
as the other; for its brazen letters tell in true epitaph how he lived
here two hundred years gone by, and how here on this spot he set up
the first printing-press in th