lked away, but presently retraced his steps and took
up the train of thought he seemed to have dropped.

"But he forgot not me. His mercies are over all his works. Even when I
was a great way off my Father saw me, and had compassion, and ran, and
fell on my neck, and kissed me. And now will he put the best robe upon
me, and a ring upon my finger, and shoes upon my feet."

Such was the excited and hoping condition of Holden's mind as the
vessel approached the port of New York, which it reached the next
morning. Although then a place of great trade, and giving indubitable
promise of what it has since become, New York was far, very far from
approaching its present splendor and magnificence, which entitle it to
vie with the most brilliant capitals of the world. Even then the ships
of all nations were to be found at its wharfs, but the taper masts
rising into the sky, formed not a cordon so immense as that which now,
like a forest stripped of its leaves, girts it round. Nor from even
its most fashionable portions, the residence and resort of the wealthy
and the gay, had all the humbler buildings, which belonged to its
origin, disappeared. Alongside of the modern brick, or occasionally
stone mansion of four stories, that style of architecture, dear yet to
the heart of a genuine Knickerbocker of which Holland boasts, if not
the invention, at least the perfectioning, reared its pointed gable,
and rose like Jacob's ladder with parapeted roof into the sky. But
slightly injured by weather in a climate singularly clear and pure,
under a sky untarnished by the dismal clouds from bituminous coal
fires, which enshroud less favored lands, the brave little Dutch
bricks held their own with a sturdiness becoming their ancestry. Those
monuments of a simpler age have almost disappeared, and the ingenuity
they exhibited, and the taste of which they were the specimens, are
likely soon to be remembered only as steps in the worlds pupilage.

But, however the fashions of man may change, the grand features of
nature remain eternal. Beautifully bright then as now sparkled in
the light of the May morning sun, the waves of that glorious bay,
unrivalled but by one, while little boats and pinnaces darting about
in all direction like sea-birds, gave animation to a scene, which
without the accompaniment would have possessed peculiar interest to
one who, like Holden, had lived so long in seclusion. As the vessel
turned around Castle Garden to seek her