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THE OLD MERCHANTS OF NEW YORK CITY
 

CHAPTER I.
 

I recently devoted a chapter to the De Forests, par¬
ticularly to Benjamin, who was a heavy merchant in
this city for many years. In that article I alluded to
old Don De Forest, who lived at New Haven forty
years ago, in a house at the upper end of the " Green,"
and to his son Carlos. This letter, regarding that
branch of the De Forest family will prove very inter¬
esting :

Walter jjarrjstt. rMti. •■

My Dear Sir—I am almost tempted to depart from the
usual custom, and address you as friend instead of sir, but I
feel the very fact of my addressing you at all, is, in your esti¬
mation, " departing " sufficiently ; but it is of the " departed "
I write you—yet, all the while, there is something within
keeps saying, ' how dare you? " In the first place, you must
know that the Leader is my special admiration. Through the
kindness of a good friend of mine in New York, I have had
the reading of it for more than two years, for which favor ho
can never know how grateful I am ; in return, I would marry
him, if — he would only ask me. Among the many good
things the paper contains, The Old Merchants is one of my
chief favorites. They are always conjured up in such an en¬
tertaining manner, I have sometimes imagined they were chi¬
merical creatures, till I read Number 147, of August 1st,
where you make mention of the family DeForest. This very
day I have been looking at a daguerreotype of that same " Dod