IV.
 

FT)HAT hath not Time wrought ? Could the enterprising
i>navigator of the Hudson revisit the scenes of his dis-
Ncoveries, would he not exclaim, "Where is Mannahata?"
) Could the burgomasters and schepens of a former
dynasty again tread the soil over which their jurisdiction once ex¬
tended, would they not exclaim, " Where is Nieuw Amsterdam ? "
And yet two centuries have scarce elapsed since the former pointed
out the location, and the latter directed the progress of the infant
state. Two centuries have sufficed to convert a settlement of a few
trading-houses into a metropolis equaled in size or commercial
importance by few in the world. Where the Indian paddled his
light canoe, now floats the gigantic battle-ship; the shores that
received the contents of the fishing-weirs are now lined with the
vehicles of commerce ; the solitary foot-path that wound through
the forest has disappeared, and in the wide avenues are seen the
busy crovvds ; where the sacrifices of a superstitious religion were
offered, the spires of Christian sanctuaries now point to heaven.

Society in New York has many phases ; it is cosmopolitan—an
amalgam, composed of all imaginable varieties and shades of charac¬
ter. It is a confluence of many streams, whose waters are ever
turbid and confused in their rushing to this great vortex. What
incongruous elements are here commingled,—the rude and the
refined, the sordid and the self-sacrificing, the religious and the
profane, the learned and the illiterate, the affluent and the destitute,