the reason for its title turns up
before me, worded in Martin Cortright's precise language:--

"Everything, my dear Barbara, has a precedent in history or the basis of
it. It is well known that the Indian tribes have taken their distinctive
names chiefly from geographical features, and these often in turn control
the pace of the people. The name for the island since called New
Amsterdam and York was Mon-ah-tan-uk, a phrase descriptive of the rushing
waters of Hell Gate that separated them from their Long Island
neighbours, the inhabitants themselves being called by these neighbours
Mon-ah-tans, _anglice_ Manhattans, literally, _People of the Whirlpool_,
a title which, even though the termagant humour of the waters be abated,
it beseems me as aptly fits them at this day."

II

MISS LAVINIA'S LETTERS TO BARBARA

NEW YORK, "GREENWICH VILLAGE," January 20, 19--.

"So you are glad that I have returned? I wish that I could say so also,
in your hearty tone of conviction. Every day of the two years that I have
been scattering myself about Europe I have wished myself at home in the
house where I was born, and have wandered through the rooms in my dreams;
yet now that I am here, I find that I was mixing the past impossibly with
the present, in a way common to those over fifty. Yes, you see I no
longer pretend, wear unsuitable headgear, and blink obliviously at my age
as I did in those trying later forties. I not only face it squarely, but
exaggerate it, for it is so much more comfortable to have people say
'Fifty-five! Is it possible?'

"By the way, do you know that you and I share a distinction in common? We
are both living in the houses where we were born, for the reason that we
wish to and not because we cannot help ourselves. Since I have been away
it appears that every one I know, of my own age, has made a change of
some sort, and joined the two streams that are flowing steadily upward,
east and west of the Park; while the people who were neither my financial
nor social equals thirty years ago are dividing the year into quarters,
with a house for each. A few months in town, a few of hotel life for
'rest' in the south, then a 'between-season' residence near by, seaside
next, mountains in early autumn, and the 'between-season' again before
the winter cruise through the Whirlpool.

"I like that name that your Martin Cortright gives to New York. Before I
went abroad I should have resented it bitterly, but the tw