ditions and ideals. This did not prevent the
British from capturing the organ designed for it and holding it up for
ransom in the War of 1812. The organ was made in Philadelphia, but was
captured en route by the British ship _Plantagenet_, a cruiser with
seventy-four guns, which was in the habit of picking up little boats
and holding them at $100 to $200 each. Luckily the church bell had
been obtained before the war!

In regard to the organ, the _Weekly Register_ of Baltimore has this to
say:

"A great business this for a ship of the line.... Now a
gentleman might suppose that this article would have passed
harmless."

St. John's Park, now obliterated and given over to the modernism of
the Hudson River Railroad Company, used, in the early fifties, to be
still fashionable. Old New Yorkers given to remembrance speak
regretfully of the quiet and peace and beauty of the Old Park--which
is no more. But St. John's is still with us, "sombre and unalterable,"
as one writer describes it, "a stately link between the present and
the past."

And doubtless nearly everyone who reads these pages knows of St.
John's famous "Dole"--the Leake Dole, which has been such a fruitful
topic for newspaper writers for decades back.

John Leake and John Watts, in the year 1792, founded the Leake and
Watts' Orphan House and John Leake, in so doing, added this curious
bequest:

"I hereby give and bequeathe unto the rector and inhabitants
of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the State of New York
one thousand pounds, put out at interest, to be laid out in
the annual income in sixpenny wheaten loaves of bread and
distributed on every Sabbath morning after divine service,
to such poor as shall appear most deserving."

This charity has endured through the years and is now the trust of St.
John's. I have been told--though I do not vouch for it--that the bread
is given out not after divine service but very early in the morning,
when the grey and silver light of the new day will not too mercilessly
oppress the needy and unfortunate, some of them once very rich, who
come for the Dole.

In 1822 St. Luke's was built--also a part of the elastic Trinity
Parish, and probably the best-known church, next to old St. John's,
that stands in Greenwich Village today.

The prejudices of the English Church in early New York prevented the
Catholics from gaining any sort of foothold until after the British
evacua