CHAPTER I.
_The Shadow of the Knickerbockers_ The Shadow of the Knickerbockers--An Old-time Map--The Beginnings of the Avenue--Watering Place Life--The Beach at Rockaway--Coney Island--Newspapers in the Thirties--Early Day Marriages--The Knickerbocker Sabbath--Home Customs--Restaurants and Hotels--The Leather-heads--Conditions of Travel--Stage-coaches and Steamers--The Clipper Ships--When Dickens First Came.
Boughton, had you bid me chant Hymns to Peter Stuyvesant.
Had you bid me sing of Wouter.
(He! the Onion-head! the Doubter!) But to rhyme of this one-mocker, Who shall rhyme to Knickerbocker?
-- _Austin Dobson_.
Before the writer, as he begins the pleasant task, is an old half-illegible map, or rather, fragment of a map.

Near-by are three or four dull prints.

They are of a hundred years ago, or thereabouts, and tell of a New York when President Monroe was in the White House, and Governor De Witt Clinton in the State Capitol, at Albany, and Mayor Colden in the City Hall.

To pore over them is to achieve a certain contentment of the soul.

Probably it held itself to be turbulent in its day--that old New York.