Did the reader ever realize how important a part the ferry and the ford have played in human affairs? How differently would history read without its Caesar crossing the Rubicon, its Xerxes crossing the Hellespont, and its Washington crossing the Delaware, its Paul Revere wherried across the Charles, and its Burr and Hamilton ferried over to Weehawken,--not to speak of the Hebrews going over Jordan, Jacob at the brook Jabbok, and John the Baptist at the fords of Bethabara! The ancients conceived of death under the figure of a ferry, and transmitted it to us with such vividness that we are still half pagan in our imagination. And I can easily believe that the battle of life may be essentially influenced by having a river to cross each day. The change from land to water, from narrow and stony streets to the wide, free outlook and uplook of a great river, the varied life of a crowded ferry-boat and of a busy harbor, the magnetic sympathies of a multitude let loose from toil and perforce at a stand-still for the time,--all this insures a transition of mind as well as transfer of body. I could appreciate the exclamation of an impulsive English girl while waiting one sultry day on a North-River pier, as she spread open her arms and rushed to the edge of the dock: "I feel as if I'd like to take a barth!" It was not the dirty scum under the piles that set her longing, but the general sense of refreshment which the broad and breezy river suggested to her imagination. Why should not those tides wash out some of the lines which a day in the city has left to deepen on a man's mind and brow?--especially if he pushes on to "sweet fields beyond the swelling flood" and enters "that dear hut," his home, under a vine-wreathed porch and along a gravel walk through a grassy lawn, and not down "area steps," or even through the ponderous and marble jaws of some city "palace." Therefore it is that the suburban hath the promise, above his mewed-up fellow-citizen, that his days shall be long in the land which the Lord God giveth him. And hence even the narrow-neckedness of land which distinguishes New York and pushes most of its population over the sides may have its compensations.