In 1797, “this antient and respectable city of Albany” (to quote the courtly compliment of Washington) became the capital of the State. At the close of the Revolution, New York had not yet determined its seat of government. From 1777 to 1796 it peregrinated between Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Albany and the city of New York. Not until the twentieth session of the Legislature was the long dispute settled. The geographical advantages of Albany finally carried the day, and for the last hundred years the site of the frontier fort has been a political arena and an illustrious seat of legislative and judicial power. The Albany of “modern times,” as the phrase is understood in our American life in which everything is new except human nature, has preserved few of the ancient landmarks. The only souvenirs are the bronze tablets which were devised at the Bicentennial in 1886, and which now designate the historic sites in the city. If one, reverent of ancient and vanished things, make pilgrimage to the tablet near the curb on the lower edge of the Capitol Park (a block above the site of Fort Frederick), to the one on the corner of Broadway and Steuben Street (the site of the northeast gate), and to the one near the curb on lower Broadway two blocks from State Street (the site of the southeast gate), he will define quite accurately the girdle of the _palisadoes_ which protected old Albany. [Illustration: STEPHEN VAN RENSSELAER. (FROM A PAINTING BY EZRA AMES.)] If he pass the memorial of the northeast gateway, a place of memorable outgoings and incomings, and continue up Broadway about three quarters of a mile, he will find a bronze tablet bearing the inscription: “Opposite Van Rensselaer Manor-House. Erected 1765. Residence of the Patroons. This spot is the site of the First Manor-House.” It was an unpretentious one-story building of Holland brick, half fortress and half dwelling. The final Manor-House, on the other side of the road, was a structure of another fashion. At the time of its erection, 1765, it was considered the handsomest residence in the colonies. Thither Stephen Van Rensselaer brought his young bride, Catherine, daughter of Philip Livingston, and his babe, who became General Van Rensselaer. It stood amid the drooping elms of a large park and was decorated with a taste and luxury startling to the period. In 1843 the building was enlarged and enriched by the elder Upjohn. Once a stately mansion, the scene of splendid hospitalities, it has shared the American fate of obstructive antiquities in thriving towns. The railroad and the “lumber district” crowded and finally strangled it. For several years it stood empty and dismantled, and obviously had outlived both its beauty and its use. In 1893 the stone and timbers were transported to the Campus of Williams College, where they were reconstructed into the Sigma Phi Society building, which perpetuates a remote suggestion of the famous Manor-House.