Native Brooks. 73 



their way on the map, but a map gives a poor history, and 

 though it may exhibit with great exactness all the wind- 

 ings and fantastic curves that a little brook may take, it 

 cannot say whether its course is over sand or rocks, nor 

 anything of the trees that grow along its banks. The map 

 tells just as much to-day of the brook that runs down to 

 the shore nearly parallel to the Turnpike road, by Brook 

 Street, as it did a hundred years ago when it emptied as a 

 pure little stream near the " Watering Place," where the 

 ships stopped to fill their casks before going to sea. No 

 one will say of it now " how beautiful," nor quote a line 

 from Bryant's " Wind and Stream," and of all the wild 

 creatures that once wandered along its banks, only a few 

 muskrats, that occasionally appear on sidewalks and in 

 cellars, now remain. 



It is the same with the Jersey Street brook, that once 

 ran to the shore by the " Still House Landing," and the 

 one that winds its way through Stapleton, an humble pris- 

 oner except in freshet time, when it occasionally assists 

 the Prohibition party, floating chairs and tables con- 

 veniently out of the saloon doors and basement windows. 

 Such was the effect of the storm of July 23d, 1887. 



That the alders, with their dangling catkins, grew 

 along the banks of these little streams is a certainty, and 

 that some Dutch settler, with expansive pantaloons — a 

 " tough breeches," as Washington Irving would call him — 

 lived near by, is a great probability. But that definite 

 description of the times and of the relationship of man to 

 the surrounding natural features, that always lends a charm 

 to a locality, cannot be made in these later days. 



