now what is called "made land,"--a manufacture
which has grown so easy that I daily expect to see some enterprising
contractor set up endwise a bar of railroad iron, and construct a new
planet at its summit, which shall presently go spinning off into space
and be called an asteroid. There are some people whom would it be
pleasant to colonize in that way; but meanwhile the unchanged southern
side of the pier seems pleasanter, with its boat-builders' shops, all
facing sunward,--a cheerful haunt upon a winter's day. On the early
maps this wharf appears as "Queen-Hithe," a name more graceful than its
present cognomen. "Hithe" or "Hythe" signifies a small harbor, and is
the final syllable of many English names, as of Lambeth. Hythe is also
one of those Cinque-Ports of which the Duke of Wellington was warden.
This wharf was probably still familiarly called Queen-Hithe in 1781,
when Washington and Rochambeau walked its length bareheaded between the
ranks of French soldiers; and it doubtless bore that name when Dean
Berkeley arrived in 1729, and the Rev. Mr. Honyman and all his flock
closed hastily their prayer-books, and hastened to the landing to
receive their guest. But it had lost this name ere the days, yet
remembered by aged men, when the Long Wharf became a market. Beeves
were then driven thither and tethered, while each hungry applicant
marked with a piece of chalk upon the creature's side the desired cut;
when a sufficient portion had been thus secured, the sentence of death
was issued. Fancy the chalk a live coal, or the beast endowed with
human consciousness, and no Indian, or Inquisitorial tortures could
have been more fearful.

It is like visiting the houses at Pompeii, to enter the strange little
black warehouses which cover some of our smaller wharves. They are so
old and so small it seems as if some race of pygmies must have built
them. Though they are two or three stories high, with steep
gambrel-roofs, and heavily timbered, their rooms are yet so low that a
man six feet high can hardly stand upright beneath the great
cross-beams. There is a row of these structures, for instance,
described on a map of 1762 as "the old buildings on Lopez' Wharf," and
to these another century has probably brought very little change. Lopez
was a Portuguese Jew, who came to this place, with several hundred
others, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. He is said to have owned
eighty square-rigged vessels in this port, from which not