lf a house, which when it was
completed showed the burnt brick alternating with the red, prettily
decorating the front and making of it the most attractive dwelling in
the town. And at this they were filled with admiration and respect.
All the townspeople went to look at the house, and while looking
marvelled that Jacob Steendam could have thought out such a useful
plan, for he was not known as a practical man. Anything but that, for
was he not a poet? More than this, was he not the only poet in the
colony? And still more than this, he was the first poet of New
Amsterdam.

[Illustration: The Wall and Gate]

And in other ways, too, this first literary man of the colony was no
ordinary man. He had come to New Amsterdam in the employ of the owners
of the colony, the Dutch West India Company, and he worked in the
Company's warehouse. But he had a mind which fixed itself on things
above the beaver skins which it was his task to register before they
were sent across the sea. He was clerk by day, poet by night. It was
his custom while the townspeople slept, and they were early abed, to
wander about in the moonlight. He could walk the length and breadth of
the town with no great exertion, for it merely tipped the triangular
point of the island of Manhattan, enclosed on two sides by rivers and
on the land side by a wall of wood and soil which served to keep the
Indians out--a wall stretching straight across the island quite from
river to river, following the line that Wall Street was to take later
when Indians should be no more and when the town itself should have
burst its bounds. Here then the poet walked through the narrow
streets--winding ways that had their birth as Indian trails, passed
their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and
deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be
irregular and vacillating.

[Illustration: An Old Family Bible]

While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may
have guessed from the brickmaking venture, yet it was certainly not a
literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to
seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas
frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the
hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was
no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading
meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books,