HOW CAN I DESCRIBE TO YOU HIS EYES, HIS HAIR, HIS VOICE
A great red brick mansion in Chambers Street, guarded by two sentinel-like elm-trees and a tall iron fence; a sidewalk filled with the fashionables of Gotham starting for the afternoon Battery promenade; and up behind the eye-like panes of one of the haughty, staring windows a maiden dreaming over her pen. There is the picture. A demure little country Phyllis, visiting her august city relatives for the first time, has found herself in two strange worlds—fashion and love. In the extract taken from her letter written to a home confidante is the key to a forgotten romance of old New York. Love! the key to all the romances since the world began. "He loves me," she writes, the time-worn phrase every true daughter of Eve has hoped to whisper to herself or cry out to the multitudes, and we feel the thrill of those faded but impassioned words as in imagination we open the gates of that old-time mansion and enter into the year of 1807.
New York society, which seems to undergo a complete revision every quarter of a century, has entirely changed since the name of Moore meant as much to the metropolis as that of Biddle to Philadelphia or Carroll to Baltimore. At the time of which I write, when the first numbers of the "Salmagundi Papers" were startling North River aristocrats, fields lay beyond the new St. John's Church, and Canal Street was looked upon by the sagacious as the probable Mecca for retail commerce. Jeremy Cockloft, the younger, gives us a glimpse of the residence portion of the city in "The Stranger at Home, or a Tour of Broadway." "Broadway—great difference in the gentility of streets; a man who resides in Pearl-Street, or Chatham-Row, derives no kind of dignity from his domicile, but place him in a certain part of Broadway—anywhere between the Battery and Wall-Street, and he straightway becomes entitled to figure in the beau monde, and struts as a person of prodigious consequence."
In the new Chambers Street, named after one of Trinity's vestrymen, was the home of Dr. William Moore, then the first physician of old New York. With a wife who was a daughter of Nathaniel Fish, and a brother, the Right Reverend Benjamin Moore, D.D., Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York and Rector of Trinity Church, his right to dose the aristocratic element of the city was undisputed. It is small wonder that his morning parlor was generally filled with patients who, tradition says, sometimes literally fought for admission into the inner room and the presence of their "dear gentlemanly doctor."
A SIDEWALK FILLED WITH THE FASHIONABLES OF GOTHAM STARTING FOR THE AFTERNOON BATTERY PROMENADE
William Moore was a physician of the old school, and is remembered as wearing a bob-tailed wig and wrist ruffles long after the fashion was obsolete. No doubt this adherence to the costume of a past régime gave him an additional hold over many of his patrons. Legion were the antique dames struggling against the invasion of demoralizing French fashions who derived momentary satisfaction watching him amble to the family pew in Trinity, followed by numerous exponents of that scapegrace, Napoleon's Empire.
Dr. William Moore, of Chambers Street! A long-dead king of pills and potions. How stern looks the old figure in the bottle-green coat the name conjures up! We can hear the voice of Thomas, the negro valet, call out, "Dis way to de Dochtar's sanctum, missy or madam." "Not you thar, ladies," as the circle rises. Many a humble possessor of a backache or a heartache must have trembled before that roomful of Crœsus's children on hearing a summons to the awesome presence. Just over the office a maiden sat one spring afternoon in the glow of a love-dream. She heard the dull murmur below, but her thoughts were too beautiful to heed an interlude so closely allied to pain. Through the garden gates the people passed in and out, and now and then the voice of Thomas would come floating to her with his "Dis way to de Dochtar's sanctum." Little did she imagine, as she bent over her pen, that she would ever be called there and the closing door shut out her love-dream forever.
NATHANIEL FISH MOORE