While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may have guessed from the brickmaking venture, yet it was certainly not a literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of patient and persistent handling.
The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep Pasture,—the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard, near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and so on to the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept.
THE STADT HUYS.
Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight, while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was Hoogh Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it was the first street to be paved with stone.
