and pools; brant, black duck, and yellow-leg splashed in the marshes and fox, rabbit, woodcock, and partridge found covert in the thicket.  Here and there was a farm, but the city, then numbering one hundred thousand persons, was far away.  Then, in 1824, the first stretch of the Avenue, from Waverly Place to Thirteenth Street, was opened, and the northward march of the great thoroughfare began.  Let us try to picture the old town of that day, the city that was still under the shadow of the Knickerbockers.

First, at the southern extremity of the island, was the Battery and Battery Park.  When, in “The Story of a New York House,” the late H.C.  Bunner described the little square of green jutting into the waters of the upper bay, it was as it had been some years before the earliest venturesome pioneers builded in lower Fifth Avenue.  From the pillared balcony of his house on State Street—­the house may still be seen—­Jacob Dolph caught a glimpse of the morning sun, that loved the Battery far better than Pine Street, where Dolph’s office was.  It was a poplar-studded Battery in those days, and the tale tells how the wind blew fresh off the bay, and the waves beat up against the sea-wall, and a large brig, with all sails set, loomed conspicuous to the view, and two or three fat little boats, cat-rigged, after the good old New York fashion, were beating down towards Staten Island, to hunt for the earliest bluefish.  That was in 1808, and sixteen years later, the Battery, with its gravelled, shady paths, and its somewhat irregular plots of grass, was still the city’s favourite breathing spot.  There, of summer evenings, after the stately walk down Broadway, the crinolined ladies and the beaux with their bell-crowned hats gathered to watch the sun set behind the low Jersey hills, and perhaps to inspect the review of the Tompkins Blues, or the Pulaski Cadets.  There was fierce rivalry between these two commands, one under Captain Vincent, and the other under Captain McArdle, and each corps had its admiring sympathizers.  Both Blues and Cadets presented a fine, martial appearance as they swung across the Battery, marching like veterans who had faced fire and would not flinch.  “Sure it was,” a flippant chronicler has recorded, “both had an undisputed reputation for charging upon a well-loaded board with a will that left no tell-tale vestige.”  Very likely, in the throng, all were not of New York.  There were doubtful strangers, too, looking with yearning eyes out over the dancing waters of the blue bay—­swarthy, weather-beaten men with huge earrings.  They called themselves “privateers-men.”  But there were those who smiled at the word, for romance had it that there were still buccaneers in the Spanish Main.

In many families that daily visit to the Battery was all the summer change.  Mr. Dayton, in his “Last Days of Knickerbocker Life,” informed us that neither belle nor gallant lost caste by declining to participate in the routine of watering place life, simple and inexperienced as it then was.  Yet there were summer resorts, and they were patronized by the best and most prominent citizens of the country.  The springs at Saratoga had already been discovered, and there were many New Yorkers who made the then long and arduous trip.