. He fastened upon adventures of real travelers; he yearned for travel,
and was entranced in his youth by first sight of the beauties of the
Hudson River. He scribbled jests for his school friends, and, of course,
he wrote a school-boy play. At sixteen his schooling was at an end, and he
was placed in a lawyer's office, from which he was transferred to another,
and then, in January, 1802, to another, where he continued his clerkship
with a Mr. Hoffman, who had a young wife, and two young daughters by a
former marriage. With this family Washington Irving, a careless student,
lively, clever, kind, established the happiest relations, of which
afterwards there came the deep grief of his life and a sacred memory.

Washington Irving's eldest brothers were beginning to thrive in business.
A brother Peter shared his frolics with the pen. His artist pleasure in
the theater was indulged without his father's knowledge. He would go to
the play, come home for nine o'clock prayers, go up to bed, and climb out
of his bed-room window, and run back and see the after-piece. So come
evasions of undue restraint. But with all this impulsive liveliness, young
Washington Irving's life appeared, as he grew up, to be in grave danger.
When he was nineteen, and taken by a brother-in-law to Ballston springs,
it was determined by those who heard his incessant night cough that he was
"not long for this world." When he had come of age, in April, 1804, his
brothers, chiefly his eldest brother, who was prospering, provided money
to send him to Europe that he might recover health by restful travel in
France, Italy and England. When he was helped up the side of the vessel
that was to take him from New York to Bordeaux, the captain looked at him
with pity and said, "There's a chap who will go overboard before we get
across." But Washington Irving returned to New York at the beginning of
the year 1806 with health restored.

What followed will be told in the Introduction to the of her volume of
this History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker.

H.M.

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY.

The following work, in which, at the outset, nothing more was contemplated
than a temporary _jeu-d'esprit_, was commenced in company with my brother,
the late Peter Irving, Esq. Our idea was to parody a small hand-book which
had recently appeared, entitled, "A Picture of New York." Like that, our
work was to begin an historical sketch; to be followed by notices of the
custo