America Volume III Part 2

THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.

The growth of population on Long Island has caused various new bridges and tunnels to be projected for crossing East River. One new bridge is to cross at Blackwell's Island, with a pier on the island. Another now nearly completed, and estimated to cost $10,000,000, crosses from Grand Street to Broadway in Brooklyn. The Long Island Railroad is arranging to bore a tunnel under East River, to be operated by electricity, to bring its trains into New York. The East River being the locality for most of the foreign s.h.i.+pping, the bridges are at high elevations, the great Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses from City Hall Park, being one hundred and thirty-five feet above the water. Its ma.s.sive piers are among the tallest structures about New York, rising two hundred and sixty-eight feet. This, the largest suspension bridge in the world, was begun in 1870 and opened for traffic in 1885. The piers stand upon caissons sunk into the rocky bed of the river, which is forty-five feet below the surface on the Brooklyn side and ninety feet below on the New York side. Their towers carry four sixteen-inch wire cables that sustain the bridge, which is built eighty-five feet wide, giving ample accommodation for two railways, two wagon roads also carrying electric cars, and a wide raised footway in the centre.

The bridge cost nearly $15,000,000, the distance between the piers is about sixteen hundred feet, and its entire length between the anchorages of the cables is three thousand four hundred and seventy-five feet. The cable anchorages are enormous ma.s.ses, each containing about thirty-five thousand cubic yards of solid masonry.

The whole length of the bridge and its elaborate approaches is considerably over a mile. Its projector was John A. Roebling, who died during the early work, and its builder, his son Was.h.i.+ngton Roebling, who caught the dreaded "caisson disease" while superintending labor under water, and for years afterward an invalid, watched the progress of the later work from his chamber window on Brooklyn Heights nearby.

The bridge has carried an enormous traffic, taxing its capacity to the utmost, and its pa.s.sengers average over a million a week. The view from its raised footway is one of the most superb sights of New York, disclosing both cities, and the extensive wharves and commerce of East River, the Navy Yard just above, and for miles over the surrounding region and down through the harbor to the distant blue hills of Staten Island.

THE CITY OF CHURCHES.

The Borough of Brooklyn, which has grown from the overflow of New York, whose people are said to go over there "chiefly to sleep or be buried," is popularly known as the "City of Churches." A large portion of the working population of the metropolis, as well as the merchants and business men, make it their home and dormitory, while there are beautiful cemeteries in the suburbs peopled largely by dead New Yorkers. Greenwood, overlooking New York harbor from Gowa.n.u.s Heights in South Brooklyn, is regarded as one of the finest American cemeteries. In no other city can be found such an aggregation of churches, developed in a past generation, and under the ministry of a regiment of distinguished clergymen, then led by Beecher and Storrs, so that the popular t.i.tle was well bestowed. Brooklyn is entirely the growth of the nineteenth century, a growth due to the inability of New York to spread, excepting far northward. It stretches several miles along East River and three or four miles inland, and grows rapidly.

When the century began, however, it was hard work to find three thousand people there, and, strangely enough, they had to cross over to New York to go to church. Just about the time old Peter Minuit was buying Manhattan from the Indians, a band of Walloons first settled in Brooklyn. Their descendants drove cows across East River to Governor's Island to graze, the b.u.t.termilk Channel between them being then shallow enough for fording, though it is now scoured out deep enough to float the largest vessels, the docks located where the cows then crossed now accommodating an enormous commerce. At first a little ferry from Fulton Street to Peck Slip, New York, accommodated the straggling village, and it has grown into more than a dozen steam ferries of the largest capacity, which (besides the bridge) will carry daily a half-million people across at one cent apiece, this fleet of packet-boats being the greatest transporters of humanity in the world.

The Indians called the region around Wallabout Bay, and Gowa.n.u.s Mercychawick, meaning "the sandy place." When the Walloons came along, they began settling on the sh.o.r.es of the bay, which they called Waal-bogt, afterwards gradually changed to its present name of Wallabout. In 1646 the town was organized by Governor Kieft as Breuckelen, he appointing Jan Eversen Bout and Huyck Aertsen as "schepens" or superintendents to preserve the peace and regulate the community. During the Revolution the British prison-s.h.i.+ps were moored in the Wallabout, and it is estimated that eleven thousand five hundred Americans, chiefly seamen, died upon them, the sh.o.r.es of the bay being full of dead men's bones, which the tides for many years washed out from the sand. In 1808 these bones were finally collected and put in a vault near the Navy Yard, which had been established on the bay. This is the chief naval station of the United States, covering about eighty-eight acres, including all the available s.p.a.ce.

There is attached a large naval hospital, while between the two is the immense Wallabout Market, covering forty-five acres, the largest in Brooklyn, its buildings being brick structures in the old Dutch style.

Fulton Street is the chief highway of Brooklyn, beginning almost under the shadow of the great Bridge. It is a broad and attractive street, stretching six miles to the eastern edge of the city, and about one mile from the river it pa.s.ses the various city buildings, including the Post-office, Court-house and Borough Hall, all handsome structures. In front of the Borough Hall is a fine statue of Brooklyn's most famous clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher. From Fulton Street radiate several of the highways leading into the fas.h.i.+onable residential quarter,--Brooklyn or Columbia Heights,--overlooking East River, where the tree-bordered streets are lined with costly and attractive dwellings. Here in Orange Street, in a very quiet spot, is Brooklyn's most noted edifice, a plain, wide, unornamented brick building, with the inscription, "Plymouth Church, 1849." Here preached for nearly forty years, until he died in 1887, Beecher, the great Puritan, whose family was so noted. His father, Lyman Beecher, like the son, fought slavery and intemperance in Boston, Litchfield and Cincinnati, and was an impressive pulpit orator. The old man was eccentric, however, and after being wrought up by the excitement of preaching, is said to have gone home and let himself down by playing on the fiddle and dancing a double-shuffle in the parlor. He had thirteen children, nearly all famous, and has been described as "the father of more brains than any other man in America." Four sons were clergymen and two daughters noted auth.o.r.esses. Henry Ward, who ruled Brooklyn, and Harriet, who wrote _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, were among the great leaders of the anti-slavery movement.

Clinton Street leaves Fulton a little beyond Orange, and pa.s.ses southward through Brooklyn Heights, being the chief street of the fas.h.i.+onable district. Embowered in trees, handsome churches and residences border it, and Pierrepont, Remsen, Montague and other noted streets extend at right angles from it to the edge of the bluff, where the Heights fall sharply off to the river. Here, at seventy feet elevation, and overlooking the lower level of buildings and piers at the water's edge, are the terraces where the finest residences are located, having a magnificent outlook upon the harbor and New York City beyond. The s.h.i.+ps land their cargoes within almost a stone's throw of the palaces. In this district there are several large apartment-houses and various clubs, a statue of Alexander Hamilton adorning the front of the Hamilton Club at Remsen and Clinton Streets.

Upon Remsen Street is another noted building, the Congregational "Church of the Pilgrims," a s.p.a.cious graystone edifice with towers, its most prominent tower and spire being a commanding landmark for vessels sailing up New York Bay. There is let into the outer wall of this church, about six feet above the pavement, a small piece of the original "Plymouth Rock" whereon the Pilgrims in 1620 landed in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay--a dark, rough-hewn fragment, projecting with irregular surface a few inches from the wall. As an author, lecturer and preacher, the veteran pastor for over a half-century, Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, acquired wide renown. Upon Clinton Street is the elegant Pointed Gothic brownstone St. Ann's Episcopal Church, famous for its choir, and on Montague Street the Holy Trinity Church, its spire rising two hundred and seventy-five feet. But almost everywhere are churches, there being about five hundred in Brooklyn. The noted Pratt Inst.i.tute is one of the best known charities of the city, founded and endowed by Charles Pratt, an oil prince, as a technical school, its s.p.a.cious and well-equipped buildings caring for thirty-four hundred students. The object of this n.o.ble inst.i.tution is "to promote manual and industrial education, and to inculcate habits of industry and thrift."

GREENWOOD CEMETERY AND PROSPECT PARK.

A border of tombs almost surrounds Brooklyn, for in the suburbs are the great cemeteries which are the burial-places of both cities. In lovely situations upon the surrounding hills are Greenwood, Cypress Hills, Evergreen, Holy Cross, Calvary, Mount Olivet, The Citizens'

Union, Was.h.i.+ngton and other cemeteries, occupying many hundreds of acres. Of these, the noted Greenwood is the chief, covering some four hundred acres on Gowa.n.u.s Heights, south of the city. This is a high ridge dividing Brooklyn from the lowlands on the south side of Long Island, and it has elevations giving charming views. The route to it crosses various railroads leading to Coney Island, which is the ultimate objective point of most Brooklyn lines of transit. A neat lawn-bordered road leads up to the magnificent cemetery entrance on Fifth Avenue, an elaborate and much ornamental brownstone structure rising into a central pinnacle over a hundred feet high. This entrance covers two fine gateways, with representations of Gospel scenes, the princ.i.p.al being the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection. The grounds display great beauty, the ridgy, rounded hills spreading in all directions, the surface being an alternation of hills and vales, vaults terracing the hillsides, with elaborate mausoleums above and frequent little lakes nestling in the pleasant valleys. Vast sums have been expended on some of the grander tombs, which are upon a scale of great magnificence. The attractive rural names of the walks and avenues, the delicious flowers and foliage, the balmy air, the lakes, valleys and points of beautiful outlook giving grand views over New York Bay and the surrounding country, make Greenwood a park as well as a cemetery, and it is generally admitted to be without a peer. Many costly pantheons and chapels cover the remains of well-known people, and one mausoleum is a large marble church. A three-sided monument of peculiar construction standing on a knoll marks the resting-place of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegrapher. Horace Greeley's tomb has his bust in bronze on a pedestal. A colossal statue surmounts the grave of the great De Witt Clinton, the Governor of New York who built the Erie Ca.n.a.l and thus secured the commercial supremacy of the city. The romantic career of Lola Montez ended in Greenwood. Commodore Garrison, who was at one time Vanderbilt's rival in steams.h.i.+p management, is interred in a mosque. The tomb of the Steinways is a large granite building. A magnificent marble canopy crowns the Scribner tomb, having beneath it an angel of mercy. There is an appropriate monument to Roger Williams. Here are also buried Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine, Peter Cooper, Henry Ward Beecher, James Gordon Bennett, Henry George and others of fame. The Firemen, the Pilots and the New York Volunteers all have grand monuments, the statue sentinels of the latter overlooking the bay. Among these magnificent sepulchres, probably the most magnificent is that of Charlotte Canda, an heiress, who died in early youth, her fortune being expended upon her tomb.

There is a high lookout upon the eastern border of this attractive place, where the flat land at the base of the ridge spreads for miles away to the sea. The Coney Island hotels, by the ocean side, are dim in the distance, and far over the water the Navesink Highlands close the view beyond Sandy Hook. The many railroads leading to Coney Island can be traced out, as on a map, across the level land. Over on the western side of the cemetery is another lookout, having a broad view of Brooklyn and the harbor, extending to the hills of Staten Island and the distant Jersey lowlands beyond. This is the verge of Gowa.n.u.s Heights, with the busy commerce of the port spread at its base. It is this magnificent scene which the marble sentinels overlook who are guarding the Volunteers' Monument erected by the city of New York.

Between Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park there are various railways, all going to Coney Island, and also the Ocean Parkway, leading thither, a splendid boulevard, two hundred feet wide, and planted with six rows of trees, being flanked on either side by a broad cycle-path. It is laid in a straight line from the southwestern corner of the Park for three miles to the great seaside resort.

Prospect Park covers nearly a square mile on an elevated ridge on the edge of Brooklyn, and it has great natural attractions which did not need much change to improve the landscape, while the fine old trees that have been there for centuries are in magnificent maturity. Its woods and meadows, winding roads, lakes and views, combine many charms. On Lookout Hill, rising two hundred feet, the most commanding point, with a view almost entirely around the compa.s.s, there is a monument on the slope in memory of the Maryland troops who fell in the Revolutionary battle of Long Island, fought in August, 1776, on these heights. The Park is ornamented with several statues, including one of Abraham Lincoln, and there is a bust of John Howard Payne, the author of _Home, Sweet Home_. It has an extensive lake, a deer preserve, children's playgrounds, and a concert grove and promenade. The main entrance is a fine elliptical plaza with a splendid fountain, and adorned by a Memorial Arch to the Soldiers and Sailors of the Civil War, and a statue of James Stranahan, a venerable citizen of Brooklyn, foremost in all its good works, who died in 1898. The Brooklyn Inst.i.tute, an academy of art and science with a large members.h.i.+p, has a large building in the Park.

CONEY ISLAND.

Pretty much all routes through Brooklyn, as already indicated, lead to Coney Island, the barren strip of white sand, clinging to the southern edge of Long Island, about ten miles from New York, which is the objective point of the populace when in sweltering summer weather they crave a breath of sea air. The antiquarians of the island insist that it was the earliest portion of these adjacent coasts discovered, and tell how Verrazani came along about 1529 and found this sand-strip, and how Hudson, nearly a century later, held conferences with the Indians on the island. But however that may be, its wonderful development as a summer resort has only come since the Civil War. It has a hard and gently-sloping beach facing the Atlantic, and can be so easily and cheaply reached, by so many routes on land and water, that it is no wonder, on hot afternoons and holidays, the people of New York and Brooklyn go down there by the hundreds of thousands. Coney Island is about five miles long, and from a quarter-mile to a mile in width, being separated from the adjacent low-lying mainland only by a little crooked creek and some lagoons. It has two bays deeply indented behind it, Gravesend Bay on the west and Sheepshead Bay on the east.

The name is derived from c.o.o.ney Island, meaning the "Rabbit Island,"

rabbits having been the chief inhabitants in earlier days. The Coney Island season of about a hundred days, from June until September, is an almost uninterrupted festival, and nothing can exceed the jollity on these beaches, when a hot summer sun drives the people down to the sh.o.r.e to seek relief and have a good time. They spread over the miles of sand-strip, with scores of bands of music of varying merit in full blast, minstrel shows, miniature theatres, Punch and Judy, merry-go-rounds and carrousels, big snakes, fat women, giant, dwarf, midget and pugilistic exhibitions, shooting-galleries, concerts, circuses, fortune-tellers, swings, toboggan slides, scenic railways, and myriads of other attractions; lakes of beer on tap, with ample liquids of greater strength; and everywhere a good-humoured crowd, sight-seeing and enjoying themselves, eating, drinking, and very numerously consuming the great Coney Island delicacy, "clam-chowder."

To the clam, which is universal and popular, the visitors pay special tribute. This famous bivalve is the _Mya Arenaria_ of the New England coast, said to have been for years the chief food of the Pilgrim fathers. Being found in abundance in all the neighboring waters, it is served in every style, according to taste. As the Coney Island "Song of the Clam" has it:

"Who better than I? in chowder or pie, Baked, roasted, raw or fried?

I hold the key to society, And am always welcome inside."

The long and narrow Coney Island sand-strip may be divided into four distinctive sections--a succession of villages chiefly composed of restaurants, lodging-houses and hotels, built along the edge of the beach, and usually on a single road behind it. In the past generation the rougher cla.s.ses best knew its western end or Norton's Point, a resort of long standing. The middle of the island is a locality of higher grade--West Brighton Beach. Here great iron piers project into the ocean, being availed of for steamboat landings, restaurants and amus.e.m.e.nt places, while beneath are bathing establishments.

Electricity and fireworks are used extensively to add to the attractions, and there is also a tall Observatory. The broad Ocean Parkway, coming down from Prospect Park and Brooklyn, terminates at West Brighton Beach. East of this is a partially vacant, semi-marshy s.p.a.ce, beyond which is Brighton Beach, there being a roadway and elevated railroad connecting them. Brighton is the third section, and about a half-mile farther east is the fourth and most exclusive section--Manhattan Beach. Here are the more elaborate and costly Coney Island hotels. In all this district the power of the ocean is shown in the effect of great storms, which wash away roads, railways and buildings, and s.h.i.+ft enormous amounts of the sands from one locality, piling them up in front of another. Huge hotels have had to be moved, in some cases bodily, a thousand feet back inland from the ocean front, to save them, and immense bulkheads constructed for protection; but sometimes the waves play havoc with these. Very much of the money spent by the visitors has to be devoted to saving the place and preventing the wreck of the great buildings. But this does not worry the visitors so much as it does the landlords. On a hot day the vast crowds arriving on the trains are poured into the hotels, and swarm out upon the grounds fronting them, where the bands play. Here the orchestras give concerts to enormous audiences. The piazzas are filled with supper-parties, the music amphitheatres are crowded, and thousands saunter over the lawns. As evening advances, the blaze of electric illumination and brilliancy of fireworks are added, and the music, bustling crowds and general hilarity give the air of a splendid festival. The bathing establishments are crowded, and many go into the surf under the brilliant illumination. Not a tree will grow, so that the view over the sea is un.o.bstructed, and out in front is the pathway of ocean commerce into New York harbor, with the twinkling, guiding lights of Sandy Hook and its attendant lights.h.i.+ps beyond. What a guardian to the mariner is the lighthouse:

"'Tis like a patient, faithful soul That, having reached its saintly goal, And seeing others far astray In storms of darkness and dismay, s.h.i.+nes out o'er life's tempestuous sea, A beacon to some sheltered lee,-- The haven of eternity."

The tall Observatory, on its airy steel framework, rises three hundred feet to overlook the wonderful scene. When the top is reached, the first impression made is by the dissonant clangor of the many bands of music below, heard with singular clearness and much more intensity of sound than on the ground. This discord ascends from all sorts of structures, generally having flat pitch-and-gravel roofs, forming a variegated carpet far below. Coney Island stretches along the ocean's edge, with the lines of foaming surf slowly rolling in. To the eastward, at Brighton and Manhattan Beaches, it bends backward like a bow, with semicircular indentations where the sea has made its inroads. To the westward, the curve of the beach is reversed, and the extreme point of the island ends in a k.n.o.b having a distinctive hook bent back on the northern side. Behind the long and narrow strip of sand there are patches of gra.s.s, and much marsh and meadow, spreading away to the northward, and meandering through the marsh can be traced the crooked little tidal creek and series of lagoons separating Coney from the mainland. Far away northward runs the broad tree-bordered Ocean Parkway, with the hills of Prospect Park and the tombs and foliage of Greenwood Cemetery hiding Brooklyn, and closing the view at the distant horizon. Various railways stretch in the same direction, some crossing the bogs on extended trestle-bridges. Many carriages are moving and thousands of people walking about in the streets and open s.p.a.ces beneath us, while upon the ocean side the piers extend out in front, with their steamboats sailing to or from the Narrows to the northward, around the k.n.o.b and hook at Norton's Point. Far south over the water are the distant Navesink Highlands behind Sandy Hook and the low adjacent New Jersey Coast, gradually blending into the Staten Island hills to the westward. Around from the south to the east is the broad and limitless expanse of ocean, where, in the words of Heinrich Heine:

"The cloudlets are lazily sailing O'er the blue Atlantic sea."

Far to the eastward, seen across the broad Jamaica Bay, are more low sandy beaches, each with its popular resort, though all pale before the crowning glories of Coney Island. There is Rockaway, with its iron pier and railway connecting with the mainland to the northeast, also Arverne and Edgemere, the distant cottage-studded Long Beach, and the hazy sand-beaches of Far Rockaway. And as we gaze over this wondrous scene down by the water side, the freshening wind gives a pleasant foretaste of old ocean, and recalls the invocation of Barry Cornwall:

"The sea! the sea! the open sea!

The blue, the fresh, the ever free!

Without a mark, without a bound, It runneth the earth's wide regions round.

"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!

I am where I would ever be, With the blue above, and the blue below, And silence wheresoe'er I go.

"I never was on the dull tame sh.o.r.e, But I loved the great sea more and more."

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.

IX.

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.

The Isle of Na.s.sau -- Captain Adraien Blok -- Roodt Eylandt -- Block Island -- Great South Bay -- Great South Beach -- Jamaica Bay -- Hempstead Bay -- Fire Island and its Lighthouse -- s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k -- Quogue-East Hampton -- Lyman Beecher -- John Howard Payne -- Garden City -- Jericho -- Elias Hicks -- Flus.h.i.+ng Bay -- Throgg's Neck -- Willett's Point -- Little Neck Bay -- Great Neck -- Sands Point -- Harbor Hill -- William Cullen Bryant -- Oyster Bay -- Lloyds' Neck -- Nathan Hale -- Ronkonkoma Lake -- The Wampum Makers -- Mamaroneck -- Byram River -- The Wooden-Nutmeg State -- Brother Jonathan -- Greenwich -- Old Put's Hill -- Stamford -- Colonel Abraham Davenport -- The Dark Day -- Norwalk -- Sasco Swamp -- Fairfield -- Pequannock River -- Bridgeport -- Phineas T.

Barnum -- Joyce Heth -- General Tom Thumb -- Jenny Lind -- Old Stratford -- Milford -- New Haven -- Quinnepiack -- John Davenport -- Yale College -- Killingworth -- Elihu Yale -- Steamboat Fulton -- East and West Rocks -- The Regicides -- Wallingford -- James Hillhouse -- Savin Rock -- Saybrook Point -- Guilford -- Connecticut River -- The Sachem's Head -- Thimble Islands -- Saybrook Platform -- Old Saybrook -- Thames River -- New London -- Groton -- Silas Deane -- Fort Hill -- Pequot Hill -- Defeat of the Pequots -- Pawcatuck -- Stonington -- Watch Hill Point -- Westerly -- Orient Point -- Plum Island -- Plum Gut -- Shelter Island -- The Gull Islands -- The Horse Race -- Fisher's Island -- Gardiner's Island -- Lyon Gardiner -- Captain Kidd and his Buried Treasures -- Sag Harbor -- Montauk Indians -- Money Pond -- Fort Pond Bay -- Montauk Point and its Lighthouse -- Ultima Thule -- Isle of Manisees -- Block Islanders -- Whittier -- Palatine Wreck.

THE ISLE OF Na.s.sAU.

The first white man who sailed upon Long Island Sound was the bluff old Dutch navigator, Captain Adraien Blok. Desirous of adventure and spoil, he built upon the sh.o.r.e of the Battery, in 1614, the first s.h.i.+p ever constructed at New York, a blunt-pointed Dutch sloop-yacht of sixteen tons, which he named the "Onrest." The four little huts he had upon the sh.o.r.e to house his builders and crew were among the first structures of the early Manhattan colony. Fitting her out, he braved the terrors of the h.e.l.l Gate pa.s.sage and started on a voyage of discovery on Long Island Sound, which he explored throughout. He found the mouth of the princ.i.p.al river of New England, the Connecticut, and coasting around Point Judith, entered Narragansett Bay, and cast anchor before an island with such conspicuously red-clay sh.o.r.es that he called it Roodt Eylandt, or the Red Island, on which Newport now stands. Then he ventured out to sea and found the bluff sh.o.r.es of Block Island, to which he gave his own name. Sated with exploration and loaded with spoil exchanged with the Indians, he then returned to New York and told of his wonderful adventures. His was the first vessel, manned by white men, known to have sailed upon the "Mediterranean of America," as Long Island Sound is popularly called.

This grand inland sea is generally from twenty to thirty miles wide, and is enclosed by Long Island, the ancient Isle of Na.s.sau of the Dutch, stretching for one hundred and thirty miles eastward from New York harbor, and being likened to a fish lying upon the water. It has a generally bluff northern sh.o.r.e along the Sound, and the southern coast, which is low and level almost to the eastern extremity, lies nearly due east and west, the island finally breaking into a chain of narrow peninsulas and islands facing the rising sun. The southern border is a continuous line of broad lagoons, separated from the Atlantic by long and narrow sand-bars. The chief lagoon is the Great South Bay, eighty miles long, fronted by the curious formation of the Great South Beach, stretching its entire length, and from one to five miles wide. Upon the outer beaches, and within the lagoons, are a succession of noted seash.o.r.e resorts. Eastward, beyond Jamaica Bay and Rockaway, is Long Beach, and behind it Hempstead Bay. Then come Jones'

Beach and Oak Island, with Ma.s.sapequa, Amityville and Lindenhurst behind them. Then we are at Babylon and Baysh.o.r.e, with the Great South Bay fronted by Fire Island, and beyond it the long sand-strip of the Great South Beach. The famous lighthouse of Fire Island, the guiding beacon to New York, one hundred and sixty-eight feet high, is flanked by summer hotels, and its flas.h.i.+ng electric light of twenty-three million candlepower is the most powerful on the Atlantic Coast. The Great South Bay spreads far eastward past Patchogue to Moriches, and then comes Quogue and the Hamptons, where the level land rises into the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k hills. At the eastern extremity are Amagansett and Montauk. It is a long coast, fringed with lights to point the mariner's way into New York harbor.

They tell us that when the "Onrest" came into the Sound there were thirteen tribes of Indians on Long Island, and that it was the mint for the aborigines, these tribes being the great makers of wampum, the Indian money, for which its beaches and bays furnished the materials.

The Montauks, on the eastern end, were the most formidable, and were usually carrying on wars with the Pequots, across the Sound in New England. Out on s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Neck is the reservation where live the small remnant of the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k tribe, there being barely a hundred of them, each family in a little house on a little farm it tills. Around Jamaica Bay once lived the Jameko tribe, all now disappeared. At quaintly named Quogue, Daniel Webster used to go fis.h.i.+ng and bathing.

The hill tops of the Hamptons have perched upon them the picturesque old Dutch windmills which are so attractive to the artists, and at East Hampton still stands the venerable gabled house where lived Lyman Beecher in his earlier ministry, and where his elder children, Catharine and Edward Beecher, were born. Here also pa.s.sed his boyhood, before he began wandering over the earth, the author of _Home, Sweet Home_, John Howard Payne, his father being the village schoolmaster.

Payne's quaint little s.h.i.+ngled cottage is East Hampton's most sacred memorial. The inhabitants of East Hampton are so much in love with their healthy home, which dates from 1648, that on its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 1898, the announcement was made that they "like East Hampton in a thick fog better than any other place in full suns.h.i.+ne." Eastward from Jamaica, in the western centre of Long Island, are Creedmoor, the noted rifle range, Hempstead, where the New York troops were mobilized in 1898 for the Spanish War, and Garden City, the model suburban town laid out by Alexander T. Stewart, containing a handsome Episcopal Cathedral. Not far away is Hicksville, and to the northward the ancient town of Jericho. This was a tract bought from the Indians by Robert, the brother of Roger Williams, in 1650, which afterwards became a place of Quaker settlement, and here lived and preached for sixty years the famous Elias Hicks, the founder of one of the Quaker sects. He was an opponent of war and of slavery, and rode all over the country as a missionary preacher.

THE NORTHERN LONG ISLAND Sh.o.r.e.

The steamboat entering Long Island Sound from New York, after pa.s.sing h.e.l.l Gate and crossing Flus.h.i.+ng Bay, emerges from the strait of East River between Throgg's Neck and Whitestone. Upon the end of Throgg's Neck, the jutting point has the graystone ramparts and surmounting earthworks of its ancient guardian, Fort Schuyler. Thrust forward from the Long Island sh.o.r.e, as if to meet it, is the protruding headland of Willett's Point, the Government torpedo station. Here also is an old stone fort down by the waterside, with the extensive ramparts of a modern fort on the bluff above. These are the defensive works commanding the approach to New York from Long Island Sound. In the neighboring havens are favorite anchorages for yachts. Beyond are the expansive waters of the Sound, and far off southward, thrust into the land, are the deep recesses of Little Neck Bay, made famous by its clams, and protected to the eastward by the curiously bifurcated peninsula of Great Neck. The northern Long Island sh.o.r.e is very irregular, and rises into hills. Bold peninsulas and deep bays form it, the surface being corrugated into hillocks and valleys, and penetrated by narrow, shallow harbors. The waves of the Sound have eroded the sh.o.r.es into steep and often precipitous bluffs of gravel, sometimes rising a hundred feet above the water, where narrow beaches, strewn with boulders, border them. At Sands Point is a great peninsula protruding in high sandy bluffs, and behind it is the highest mountain on Long Island, Harbor Hill, rising three hundred and fifty feet above the village of Roslyn, at the head of the deeply indented Hempstead Harbor, where lived at his home of Cedarmere, for many years, William Cullen Bryant, who now sleeps in the little cemetery.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _William Cullen Bryant at "Cedarhurst," Roslyn_]

Oyster Bay is deeply indented into the land to the eastward, surrounded by villas and attractive homes, and beyond protrudes the broad, high headland of Lloyds' Neck. This was strongly fortified by the British in the Revolution, and King William IV., then the youthful Duke of Clarence, was at one time an officer of the garrison. It was attacked and captured by the Americans who came over from Connecticut in 1779, the garrison being taken prisoners. Subsequently the British again took possession, and the French from Newport attacked them in 1781, but were repulsed. The hero of Oyster Bay is Captain Nathan Hale of Connecticut, whose statue stands in New York City Hall Park. He had been sent by Was.h.i.+ngton in 1776, across the Sound, to examine the British defenses of Brooklyn, and, returning, was captured by some Tories at Oyster Bay, and the next day hanged in New York as a spy.

Though but twenty-one years old, he met his fate bravely, saying: "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." The British destroyed his farewell letters, the provost-marshal saying "that the rebels should not know they had a man in their army who could die with so much firmness." Oyster Bay was bought in 1653 from the Matinec.o.c.k Indians by a Pilgrim colony from Sandwich, Ma.s.sachusetts, and a treaty made at Hartford established it as the boundary between the Dutch of New York and the English of New England.