rpinning, but, drawn by four, six, or eight horses, it still took
the road on holidays; and in winter, when the sleighing was unusually
fine, with its wheels transformed into sectional runners like a gigantic
bob-sled, it swept majestically out upon the road, where it towered
above the flock of flying cutters whose bells set the air a-jingle from
Bloomingdale to King's Bridge.

[Illustration]

But if the beauty of Broadway as a country high-road had been marred by
its adaptation to the exigencies of a suburb of moderate means, we boys
felt the deprivation but little. To right and to left, as we wandered
northward, five minutes' walk would take us into a country of green
lanes and meadows and marshland and woodland; where houses and streets
were as yet too few to frighten away that kindly old Dame Nature who was
always so glad to see us. If you turned to the right--to the east, that
is--you found the laurel-bordered fields where we played baseball--I
don't mean that the fields sprouted with laurels for us boys in those
old days of 29 to 34 scores, but that the _Kalmia latifolia_ crowned the
gray rocks that cropped out all around. Farther up was the wonderful and
mysterious old house of Madame Jumel--Aaron Burr's Madame Jumel--set
apart from all other houses by its associations with the fierce,
vindictive passions of that strange old woman, whom, it seems to me, I
can still vaguely remember, seated very stiff and upright in her great
old family carriage. At the foot of the heights, on this side, the
Harlem River flowed between its marshy margins to join Spuyten Duyvil
Creek--the Harlem with its floats and boats and bridges and ramshackle
docks, and all the countless delights of a boating river. Here also was
a certain dell, halfway up the heights overlooking McComb's Dam Bridge,
where countless violets grew around a little spring, and where there was
a real cave, in which, if real pirates had not left their treasure, at
least real tramps had slept and left a real smell. And on top of the
cave there was a stone which was supposed to retain the footprint of a
pre-historic Indian. From what I remember of that footprint I am
inclined to think that it must have been made by the foot of a derrick,
and not by that of an Indian.

[Illustration]

But it was on the other side of the Island, between the Deaf and Dumb
Asylum and Tubby Hook, and between the Ridge and the River, that I most
loved to ramble. Here was the slope of a