able beau of a mariner, with knee-buckles positively
resplendent and an Admiral's wig. And, though it may not be a good
likeness, it is an agreeable enough ideal, and I think everyone
approves of it.

Robert Richard Randall is buried down there now and on his monument is
a simple and rather impressive inscription commemorating this charity
which--so it puts it--was "conceived in a spirit of enlarged
Benevolence."

Shortly afterwards he died, but his will, in spite of the inevitable
wrangling and litigation of disgusted relations, lived on, and the
Snug Harbour for Tired Sailors is an accomplished fact. Randall had
meant it to be built on his property there--a good "seeded-to-grass"
farm land,--and thought that the grain and vegetables for the sailor
inmates of this Snug Harbour on land could be grown on the premises.
But the trustees decided to build the institution on Staten Island.
The New York Washington Square property, however, is still called the
Sailors' Snug Harbour Estate, and through its tremendous increase in
value the actual asylum was benefited incalculably. At the time of
Captain Randall's death, the New York estate brought in about $4,000 a
year. Today it is about $400,000,--and every cent goes to that real
Snug Harbour for Tired Sailors out near the blue waters of Staten
Island. So the "honest privateering" fortune has made at least one
impossible seeming dream come true.

As time went on this section--the Sailors' Snug Harbour Estate and the
Brevoort property--was destined to become New York's most fashionable
quarter. Its history is the history of American society, no less, and
one can have no difficulty in visualising an era in which a certain
naive ceremony combined in piquant fashion with the sturdy solidity of
the young and vigorous country. In the correspondence of Henry
Brevoort and Washington Irving and others one gets delightful little
pictures--vignettes, as it were--of social life of that day. Mr. Emmet
writes begging for some snuff "no matter how old. It may be stale and
flat but cannot be unprofitable!" Brevoort asks a friend to dine "On
Thursday next at half-past four o'clock." He paints us a quaint sketch
of "a little, round old gentleman, returning heel taps into
decanters," at a soiree, adding: "His heart smote him at beholding the
waste & riot of his dear adopted." We read of tea drinkings and
coaches and his father's famous blunderbuss or "long gun" which he is
presenting to Irvin