tisement that appeared in the _Evening Post_
under the date of October 26, 1809, attracting the attention of all
New York. People read it as they sat at supper, talked of it afterward
around their wood fires, and thought of it again and again before
they fell asleep at night. And yet not a soul knew the missing old
gentleman or had ever heard of him before. Still he was no stranger to
them, for he was a Knickerbocker, and everyone was interested in
the Knickerbockers, and everyone felt almost as if a grandfather or
great-grandfather had suddenly come back to life and disappeared again
still more suddenly without a word of explanation.

Those who could remember their childhood sent their wits back into the
past and gathered up memories of these old Knickerbockers. They saw
the old burghers again walking through the streets dressed in their
long-waisted coats with skirts reaching nearly to the ankles, and
wearing so solemnly their low-crowned beaver hats, while their small
swords dangled by their sides to show their importance. They saw their
wives in their close-fitting muslin caps, with their dress-skirts
left open to show their numerous petticoats of every color, their
gay stockings, and their low-cut, high-heeled shoes. They entered the
quaint gabled houses made of brick brought from Holland, and sat
in the roomy kitchen whose floor had just been sprinkled with sand
brought from Coney Island, and on whose walls hung deer antlers and
innumerable Dutch pipes. They passed into the parlor, whose chief
ornament was the carved bedstead upon which reposed two great
feather-beds covered with a patch-work quilt. They sat in the
fireplace and drank from the huge silver tankard while listening to
stories of Indian warfare. In the streets they saw groups of Indians
standing before the shop windows, and passed by the walls of the old
fort wherein cows, pigs, and horses were feeding. They noticed the
queerly rigged ships in the bay, the windmills scattered everywhere,
and the canal passing right through the town and filled with Dutch
canal boats. They saw the Dutch maidens standing around the ponds
washing the family linen, and visited the bowerie or country house
of some honest burgher, and sat with him in his little garden where
cabbages and roses flourished side by side.

Such were the scenes that the strange advertisement called up, and
more than one New Yorker dreamed that night that he was a child again,
living over those l