CHAPTER I.
_The Chequered History of a City Square_ ...

I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early association, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable.

It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare--the look of having had something of a social history .-- HENRY JAMES (in "Washington Square").
There is little in our busy, modern, progressive city to suggest Father Knickerbocker, with his three-cornered hat and knee-breeches, and his old-world air so homely and so picturesque.

Our great streets, hemmed by stone and marble and glittering plate glass, crowded with kaleidoscopic cosmopolitan traffic, ceaselessly resonant with twentieth century activity, do not seem a happy setting for our old-fashioned and beloved presiding shade.

Where could he fall a-nodding, to dream himself back into the quaint and gallant days of the past?
Where would he smoke his ancient Dutch pipe in peace?
One has a mental picture of Father Knickerbocker shaking his queued head over so much noise and haste, so many new-fangled, cluttering things and ways, such a confusion of aims and pursuits on his fine old island! And he would be a wretched ghost indeed if doomed to haunt only upper New York.