Any one comparing the two pictures accompanying this chapter will see how marvelously we have improved since the days of the Dutch. No. 1 is copied from an old print, dating back to 1620, and is warranted wholly reliable. It is undoubtedly the Sabbath day, for in the foreground is seen an influential citizen of the period, who has come down to the Battery to meditate and fish for eels. He is thinking “How many ages hence will this, his lofty scene, be acted over.” Presently he will catch an eel.
Sketch No. 2 is of more recent origin, and was taken from our artist’s window. When this picture was first drawn the Brooklyn pier of the bridge was plainly discernible in the background. But since then our landlord, who is a German, and conducts a restaurant on Teutonic principles on the ground floor, has humanely run up a vent-pipe from his kitchen opposite our window, which necessarily excludes the picturesque ruin of the bridge from view. The reader will observe that nothing is now visible but a tall square sheet iron tube and an overpowering sense of garlic, which destroy at once our view and our appetite.
CHAPTER X.
A FLOOD OF HISTORICAL LIGHT IS LET IN UPON NEW JERSEY—ABORIGINES—THE FIRST BOARDING HOUSE—ORGAN-GRINDING AS A FINE ART.
Not many generations ago New Jersey was a buzzing wilderness—howling would be a misnomer, as the tuneful mosquito had it all to himself.
“His right there was none to dispute.”
The tuneful mosquito was, in fact, your true New Jersey aboriginal, and we do not hesitate to assert that the wilderness buzzed. But the time came at last when the wilderness of New Jersey was to have something else to do.
In the year (confound it! what year was it now?) a select company of colonists landed at Hoboken, led by one Philip Carteret. The latter carried with him a large supply of agricultural implements to remind the colonists that they must rely mainly upon the cultivation of cabbages, and devote their energies more or less to the manufacture of Apple Jack for their livelihood. But he soon saw his error, and immediately cabled over for a supply of mosquito nets to instill into their minds the axiom that “self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
Mr. Carteret opened a boarding house in Hoboken, to be conducted on strictly temperance principles, and devoted his leisure to the civilizing of the aborigines; but his efforts in this direction were crowned with but partial success.