A deep narrow creek penetrated the island, at this point, for the distance of a quarter of a mile.  Each of its banks had a row of buildings, as the houses line a canal in the cities of Holland.  As the natural course of the inlet was necessarily respected, the street had taken a curvature not unlike that of a new moon.  The houses were ultra-Dutch, being low, angular, fastidiously neat, and all erected with their gables to the street.  Each had its ugly and inconvenient entrance, termed a stoop, its vane or weathercock, its dormer-windows, and its graduated battlement-walls.  Near the apex of one of the latter, a little iron crane projected into the street.  A small boat, of the same metal, swung from its end,—­a sign that the building to which it was appended was the ferry-house.

An inherent love of artificial and confined navigation had probably induced the burghers to select this spot, as the place whence so many craft departed from the town:  since, it is certain, that the two rivers could have furnished divers points more favorable for such an object, inasmuch as they possess the advantage of wide and unobstructed channels.

Fifty blacks were already in the street, dipping their brooms into the creek, and flourishing water over the side-walks, and on the fronts of the low edifices.  This light but daily duty was relieved by clamorous collisions of wit, and by shouts of merriment, in which the whole street would join, as with one joyous and reckless movement of the spirit.

The language of this light-hearted and noisy race was Dutch, already corrupted by English idioms, and occasionally by English words;—­a system of change that has probably given rise to an opinion, among some of the descendants of the earlier colonists, that the latter tongue is merely a patois of the former.  This opinion, which so much resembles that certain well-read English scholars entertain of the plagiarisms of the continental writers, when they first begin to dip into their works, is not strictly true; since the language of England has probably bestowed as much on the dialect of which we speak, as it has ever received from the purer sources of the school of Holland.  Here and there, a grave burgher, still in his night-cap, might be seen with a head thrust out of an upper window, listening to these barbarisms of speech, and taking note of all the merry jibes, that flew from mouth to mouth with an indomitable gravity, that no levity of those beneath could undermine.

As the movement of the ferry-boat was necessarily slow, the Alderman and his companion were enabled to step into it, before the fasts were thrown aboard.  The periagua, as the craft was called, partook of a European and an American character.  It possessed the length, narrowness, and clean bow, of the canoe, from which its name was derived, with the flat bottom and lee-boards of a boat constructed for the shallow waters of the Low Countries.  Twenty years ago,