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.