eel_ of Jacob Dolph to sell timber,
and it was not genteel of Abram Van Riper to be a ship-chandler. There
was, then, a difference between Jacob Dolph and Abram Van Riper--a
difference which, in forty years, Abram Van Riper had never conceived
of. There were folks who held thus. For himself, he did not understand
it. What difference there was between selling the wood to make a ship,
and selling the stores to go inside of her, he could not understand.

The town was changing for the worse; he saw that. He did not wish--God
forbid!--that his son John should go running about to pleasure-gardens.
But it would be no more than neighborly if these young bucks who went
out every night should ask him to go with them. Were William Irving's
boys and Harry Brevoort and those young Kembles too fine to be friends
with his boy? Not that he'd go with them a-rollicking--no, not that--but
'twould be neighborly. It was all wrong, he thought; they were going
whither they knew not, and wherefore they knew not; and with that he
cursed their airs and their graces, and pounded down to the Tontine, to
put his name at the head of the list of those who subscribed for a
testimonial service of plate, to be presented to our esteemed
fellow-citizen and valued associate, Jacob Dolph, on his retirement from
active business.

* * * * *

Jacob Dolph at this moment was setting forth from his house in State
Street, whose pillared balcony, rising from the second floor to the
roof, caught a side glance of the morning sun, that loved the Battery
far better than Pine Street. He had his little boy by the hand--young
Jacob, his miniature, his heir, and the last and only living one of his
eight children. Mr. Dolph walked with his stock thrust out and the lower
end of his waistcoat drawn in--he was Colonel Dolph, if he had cared to
keep the title; and had come back from Monmouth with a hole in his hip
that gave him a bit of a limp, even now in eighteen-hundred-and-seven.
He and the boy marched forth like an army with a small but enthusiastic
left wing, into the poplar-studded Battery. The wind blew fresh off the
bay; the waves beat up against the seawall, and swirled with a chuckle
under Castle Garden bridge. A large brig was coming up before the wind,
all her sails set, as though she were afraid--and she was--of British
frigates outside the Hook. Two or three fat little boats, cat-rigged,
after the good old New York fashion, were b