French,--France then being at war with
England,--and rather than have the slightest bit of information
conveyed to the enemy through his means, the clergyman tossed the
precious pages into the sea. In the course of time, released by the
French, he reached England, and there rewrote the history from memory,
and drew for it a quaint map of the town as he had known it. Having
done so much he died, leaving his work to lie for more than a century
and a quarter unpublished, until, in 1843, a London bookseller put it
into print. The original, being sold again passed through several
hands until it finally found a resting-place in the British Museum,
where it is now preserved.

[Illustration: BROAD STREET, 1642.]

The early days of the eighteenth century saw the fitting out of the
first library to which the townsmen had general access--a library that
in the next fifty years was to change from the private property of the
Rev. John Sharpe into the Corporation Library, and later be chartered
as the Society Library, under which title it was to live to grow
richer and richer in literary treasures until it came to be called the
oldest library in America in the days when the city had grown far
beyond any bounds then thought of. In the first days of its existence,
the library occupied tiny quarters, quite large enough for all the
books it contained, in a room in the City Hall. This was not in the
old Stadt Huys of the Dutch by the waterside, for that was gone now,
but in a pretentious building facing the "broad street" that had been
made by the filling up of the Heere Graft of old. Other buildings
were set up at this same time. There was the new French Huguenot
church which had been in Petticoat Lane and was now rebuilt in the
newly laid-out street below the Maiden's Lane, called Pine Street from
the pine-trees there. Then there was the church called Trinity. Though
it, too, was a new church, the ground on which it stood had a history
that harked back to the very earliest Dutch times. For it was upon the
lower edge of the Annetje Jans Farm, the strip of land above the city
to the west which had been given to the husband of Annetje Jans far
back in the year 1635; that had been linked with another farm by
Governor Lovelace to make the Duke's Farm; and had become the King's
Farm when the duke after whom it was named became a king. And then, it
having become the Queen's Farm (and Queen Anne graciously presenting
it in the year 1703 to Tri