CHAPTER II. 



AXCI-IM, DAYS AND AXGUNG WRITERS. 



"As life runs on the road grows strange 



With faces new; and near the end 

 The milestone into headstones change, 



Neath everyone a friend." 



YES, it's up to me ! I have traveled wide, met many people, led a checkered 

 life, and grown old; and because I have passed seven years beyond the Scripture 

 limit of three-score and ten, and so survived the majority of globe-trotters who 

 were contemporaries of my youth and young manhood, I have been deputed to act 

 the role of "Old Mortality," and repeat his kindly offices by scraping off the 

 moss which has overgrown their personal records and their memories. So here 

 I am again, as the clown said when he tumbled into the ring; and in accordance 

 with the stereotyped fashion of campfire narration, I will proceed to knock the 

 ashes from my pipe and summon the res gestae of the departed from out of the 

 nimbus which enfolds the brain. What will be mere gossip to the adolescents 

 "-ill be hard-pan reminiscence to the old and superannuated. 



And this "reminds me !" 



But first let me say a word for myself, how I came to meet up with these 

 sturdy and weatherbeaten men at arms, who, like Romulus and Remus, were 

 suckled on the lupine milk of tough experiences ; who have tracked the seques- 

 tered parts of earth ; and followed the blazes through the woods and over the 

 ledges; and the tide-rips over the seas. It will carry us back quite a little to those 

 days when residents of New York City got all their water from wooden pumps 

 at the street corners, when pigs rooted the gutters, and the night watch wore 

 black leather capes and sou'westers in rainy weather, carried brass stars on their 

 breasts, and called off the small hours with ''All's well !" 



I was born a little above Canal street, about the time when it was crossed 

 by a bridge, but I never fished the Collect Pond, where the "Tombs" stand now, 

 nor shot snipe on the Lispenard Meadows, but my nurse used to wheel me along 

 the footpath that meandered diagonally across the Washington Parade Ground 

 to Sixth avenue and Thirteenth street, and I grew apace on the prosperity which 

 preceded the great fire of 1835" and the panic of 1837. 



With the rake-off from that period of inflation, my thrifty father built him 

 a replica of Kenilworth Castle, with tower and battlements and retaining wall 

 on a bluff by the seaside at New Haven, Conn., and there I was nurtured and 

 grew to my teens ; clams at low water and ducks at high tide, dapping in the 

 full of the moon along the sedge where the incoming waves lapped the mussel- 

 beds which lined the curve of the beach. In that school of technology I learned 

 to build a correct fire, and cook shell-fish on iron hoops, as practiced at Coney 

 Island in the old days when it was only a waste of sand dunes and salt grass, 

 and Gil Davis was "governor.'' What would the old man think of the trans- 

 formation now? What would John I. Snedicor, who ran the Oceanic, and old 

 man Wykoff say? Wykoff had the only shanty on the island. There were conies 

 in those days, and striped bass run up the Coney Creek. 



(10) 



