It perhaps was the occasion of his seeking the upper part of the city, where houses were more scarce and there were fewer people to be unconcerned!  In country solitudes he could still be the chief figure.  He entered Broadway at the point where Grace Church stands, and passed on through the sparsely inhabited region now known as Union Square.  The streets hereabouts were but roughly marked out, and were left in many places to the imagination.  On the corner of Twenty-third Street was a low whitewashed inn, whose spreading roof overshadowed the girdling balcony.  Farmers’ wagons were housed beneath the adjoining shed, and one was drawn up before the door, its driver conversing with a personage in shirt-sleeves and straw hat, answering to the name of Corporal Thompson.

Helwyse perhaps stopped at the Corporal’s hospitable little establishment to rest himself and get some breakfast; but whether or not, his walk did not end here, but continued up Broadway, and after passing a large kitchen-garden (whose owner, a stout Dutchman, was pacing its central path, smoking a long clay pipe which he took from his lips only to growl guttural orders to the gardeners who were stooping here and there over the beds), emerged into open country, where only an occasional Irish shanty broke the solitude.

How long the young man walked he never knew; but at length, from the summit of a low hill, he looked northwest and saw the gleam of Hudson River.  Leaving the road he struck across rocky fields which finally brought him to the river-bank.  A stony promontory jutted into the water, and on this (having clambered to its outer extremity) Helwyse sat down, his feet overhanging the swirling current.  The tide was just past the flood.

About two hundred yards up stream, to the northward, stood a small wooden house, on the beach in front of which a shabby old mariner was bailing out his boat.  Southwards, some miles away, curved the shadowed edge of the city, a spire mounting here and there, a pencilled mist of smoke from chimneys, a fringe of thready masts around the farthest point.  In front slid ceaselessly away the vast sweep of levelled water, and still it came undiminished on.  The opposing shore was a mile distant, its rocky front gradually gaining abruptness and height until lost round the northern curve.  But directly opposite Helwyse’s promontory, the stony wall was for some way especially precipitous and high, its lofty brink serried with a thick phalanx of trees.

This spot finally monopolized the adventurer’s attention; had he been in Germany, he would have looked for gray castle-towers rising behind the foliage.  The place looked inaccessible and romantic, and was undeniably picturesque.  New York was far enough away to be mistaken for—­say—­Alexandria; while the broad river certainly took its rise in as prehistoric an age as the Nile itself.  Perhaps in the early morning of the world some chieftain built his stronghold there, and fought notable battles and