waxed green and smiled luxuriously as if conscious of the enormous square-foot value of the land that they were pre-empting.  But King Dynamite came, and the steam drill came, and the air clanged with the driving of many rivets, and the Mountain Men, and their goats, and their wives, and their unwashed offspring, and their Lares and Penates went forth into the wilderness—­no one knows just where.  The days of Squatter Sovereignty had passed.

But the Mountain men and women within the memory were the hardy, obstinate, unyielding survivors, the last to cling to the strongholds in a region that once seemed impregnable.  Before Central Park was laid out Fifty-ninth Street was the dividing line.  Below, rich brown-stone; above, along the country road which was then Fifth Avenue, a waste, squalid yet in its way picturesque, that extended almost to Mount Morris Park.  “Here lived,” “Fifth Avenue” tells us, “over five thousand as poverty-stricken and disreputable people as could be seen anywhere.  The squatters’ settlements in the Park were surrounded by swamps, and overgrown with briers, vines, and thickets.  The soil that covered the rocky surface was unfit for cultivation.  Here and there were stone quarries and stagnant pools.  In this wilderness lived the squatters, in little shanties and huts made of boards picked up along the river fronts and often pieced out with sheets of tin, obtained by flattening cans.  Some occupants paid ten dollars and twenty-five dollars rent, but the majority paid nothing.  Three stone buildings, two brick buildings, eighty-five or ninety frame houses, one rope-walk and about two hundred shanties, barns, stables, piggeries, and bone-factories, appear in a census made just before Central Park was begun.  Some of the shanties were dug-outs, and most had dirt floors.  In this manner lived, in a state of loose morality, Americans, Germans, Irish, Negroes, and Indians.  Some were honest and some were not; many were roughs and crooks.  Much of their food was refuse, which they procured in the lower portion of the city, and carried along Fifth Avenue to their homes in small carts drawn by dogs.  The mongrel dogs were a remarkable feature of squatter life, and it is said that the Park area contained no less than one hundred thousand ‘curs of low degree,’ which, with cows, pigs, cats, goats, geese, and chickens, roamed at will, and lived upon the refuse, which was everywhere.  In the neighbourhood of these squatter settlements, of which the largest was Seneca Village, near Seventy-ninth Street, the swamps had become cesspools and the air was odoriferous and sickening.”