18 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
mother to make him “‘a black broadcloth coat with skirts and 
covered buttons.” He sometimes sent his mother purchases 
of cloth from the store, such as a remnant of merino or a mus- 
lin collar. 
An earlier letter than this gave many homely details of his 
life in New York. It began: “I received by Mr. Baldwin five 
nightcaps, a pin-cushion, and some wedding-cake.” Some- 
what ungrammatically he continued: ‘““There is in the store 
beside the firm twenty-four clerks, including two book-keep- 
ers.”” An expense account in this letter listed: hair cutting 
1214c, one vial of turpentine to get some spots out of coat 
614c, shoes mended 183,c, two papers of tobacco to put in 
trunks to prevent moths getting in 1214c, one straw hat $1, 
and a steel pen 1214c. Steel pens were then replacing quills. 
David had thought that the straw hat from home was too 
dirty. 
Next to the great fire, probably the most sensational news- 
paper story of the period was the scandalous murder of a 
“bad girl” called Ellen Jewett, by a man of the upper class in 
a luxurious house of ill repute. James Gordon Bennett him- 
self visited the scene and regaled the readers of his New York 
Herald with lurid details. The trial that followed, in which 
the murderer was acquitted, engrossed the New Yorkers of 
1836. It must have seemed frightfully sinful to young Cyrus 
from Stockbridge, for it revealed a phase of life of which he 
knew little. 
For amusements, besides walks along the Hudson, he pa- 
tronized the Mercantile Library at Nassau and Beekman 
streets. He wrote to his mother that he had read through the 
Pilgrim’s Progress, and that he and another clerk (apparently 
his room-mate) took turns in reading a chapter of the Bible 
“every night before we go to bed, and we have got as far as 
the 25th chapter of Genesis.” He also joined an Eclectic 
Fraternity, which met weekly over a leather store for debates. 
A loan of twenty-five dollars from his father seemed to prey 
