R

1918

The little New York Society Li

PICTURE OF QUAINT CITY IN OLD BURGHER DAYS

Square-Armed Water Mill Dominates Scene and Key Tells Who Lived in Each Separate "Huys"-Canoes and Indians on the Placid River-Sketch Was Made in 1630.

Red-roofed little cottages, scattered here and there on a green island about a fortress, dominated by one, great square-armed windmill of Dutch design, and screened on the sea-going side by threemasted sailing vessels, made up, about three hundred years ago, the City of New York. The red roofs slanted slowly from their tops to form deep eaves or else climbed up with even steps, first in and then up, making, against the harbor horizon, a staircase silhouette. Men with buckled boots and broadbrimmed hats went in and out about their business, and, out in the bay, if the earliest picture of New York City be believed, Indians, with feathers in their hair, paddled about in large canoes, by fours and fives, or singly in smaller canoes. The picture, which is a very tiny one and marked "t' Fort Amsterdam ор de Manhatans, " is among the collection of old New York maps and pictures and papers which the New York Society Library, at 109 University Place, is showing, because this is the tercentenary of commercial New York. The little picture was made in 1630, and others bear date of 1650, 1745, 1840, and

stacks tucked away in dark holes-inthe-wall and up toward the skylight, behind the balcony railings, is one of the few places in New York which has kept itself ready for the tercentenary and for the showing of the old, old pictures. It is the only place where the broad-brimmed hats would seem to feel fathe little handful of houses and the miliar on one's own head, where windmill and the Indians in canoes lurking near the white sails in the bay seem to be of to-day instead of the day before yesterday, and where Time has apparently stood still and made room for anything but action, anything but haste.

By some strange chance, up near the three long windows a bust of Napoleon glimmers large and white; but opposite him is Emerson. Between them, dusky and shadowful and reminiscent as the room itself, is one of Rembrandt's portraits of himself, looking out broodingly upon the city which his countrymen began. And very near on the table, where the current periodicals are, the garish cover of a fifteen-cent, popular magazine strikes a discordant note.

square-armed "watmolen" still dominates. The map above, for the picture is only etched into the lower right hand corner of an