bridge that crosses from the Manhattan
to the Brooklyn shore; leads to the open space at the top of Cherry
Hill, then makes a steep descent as though about to plunge deep into
the river. For much of its length it is a constant scene of noise and
bustle and disorder--that is, in the daylight hours. At night, when
it is silent and deserted, it suggests the time, far back in the year
1678, when it was a country lane some distance from the city, a
by-path leading from the house of Jacob Leisler to the river. It was
Frankfort Lane then, Leisler calling it so as a reminder of the German
town of his birth. Now it has become Frankfort Street. Leisler's
garden was close upon the spot where the street touches the parkside,
and here Leisler was executed in 1691, a martyr to the cause of
constitutional liberty.

The lane was beginning to assume the proportions of a street in the
year 1752, when there lived in one of the dainty houses that fronted
it the family of Pierre Freneau, the last of a long line of Huguenots.
There were Freneaus who fought with the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and
there were Freneaus still living in that ancient city when the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced so many to strange lands. The
Freneau family, refugees from their native land, prospered in America,
and a son born in the Frankfort Street house in this year 1752 gave
historic interest to the name. The boy was christened Philip, and came
to be called the Poet of the Revolution.

Philip Freneau struggled through babyhood in Frankfort Street, and
just as he was able to walk was whisked away to a farm in New Jersey,
where his father had built a house, calling it Mount Pleasant after
the old homestead in La Rochelle.

Quite within the throw of a stone of Frankfort Street, and in the very
year of Philip Freneau's birth, was born Eliza Schuyler, who with the
passing of years was to marry and bear the name of Eliza Bleecker and
the title of the first poetess of New York.

[Illustration: The Collect]

In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit
of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called
Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many
soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of
patriots--the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in
hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the
City Hall Park. Sometimes, in the mid-summer, sh