hacking drafts that, I declare, to this very day, some
odd silver pieces of the resultant spending-money keep turning up, now
and then, in forgotten pockets of my mind.

The field of my boyish activity was practically limited by the existing
conditions of the city's growth. With each year there was less and less
temptation to extend that field southward. The Bloomingdale Road, with
its great arching willows, its hospitable old road-houses withdrawn from
the street and hidden far down shady lanes that led riverward--the
splendid old highway retained something of its charm; but day by day the
gridiron system of streets encroached upon it, and day by day the
shanties and the cheap villas crowded in along its sides, between the
old farmsteads and the country-places. And then it led only to the raw
and unfinished Central Park, and to the bare waste and dreary fag-end of
a New York that still looked upon Union Square as an uptown quarter.
Besides that, the lone scion of respectability who wandered too freely
about the region just below Manhattanville, was apt to get his head
most beautifully punched at the hands of some predatory gang of
embryonic toughs from the shanties on the line of the aqueduct.

[Illustration]

That is how our range--mine and the other boys'--was from Tiemann's to
Tubby Hook; that is, from where ex-Mayor Tiemann's fine old house, with
its long conservatories, sat on the edge of the Manhattanville bluff and
looked down into the black mouths of the chimneys of the paint-works
that had paid for its building, up to the little inn near the junction
of Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Hudson River. Occasionally, of course,
the delight of the river front tempted us farther down. There was an
iron-mill down there (if that is the proper name for a place where they
make pig-iron), whose operations were a perpetual joy to boyhood's
heart. The benevolent lovers of the picturesque who owned this mill had
a most entrancing way of making their castings late in the afternoon, so
as to give a boy a chance to coast or skate, an hour after school
closed, before it was time to slip down to the grimy building on the
river's bank, and peer through the arched doorway into the great, dark,
mysterious cavern with its floor of sand marked out in a pattern of
trenches that looked as if they had been made by some gigantic
double-toothed comb--a sort of right-angled herring-bone pattern. The
darkness gathered outside, and deepened st