There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on Staten Island--not only those which everybody knows, like the Hermitage in the Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort at Willets Point, but remote ones which have not yet been exploited in plays or books, and which still have a fine old flavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S. and much earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be sure, though still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields all about, they are now used for Tammany head-quarters with pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old-fashioned windows--but most of them would have gone out of existence entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it had not been for the approach of the city, and the side-whiskered New Yorkers of a previous generation who drove fast horses. If the ghosts of these men ever drive back to lament the good old days together, they must be somewhat surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these rural road-houses doing a better business than even in their day. The bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has since been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exercise, the places that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten. They are visited now in automobiles. [Illustration: An Old-fashioned Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten Island.)] There are all those historic country-houses within the city limits, well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly by reason of being within the city, like the Van Cortlandt house, now a part of the park, and the Jumel mansion standing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into most historical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion; and the old Lorillard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by this time but that it has been made into a park house and restaurant. Nearly all these are tableted by the "patriotic" societies, and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place in Flushing, a very old type of Long Island farm-house, was turned into a museum by the Bowne family itself--an excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-house in Flushing, though not so old by twenty-five years as it is painted in the sign which says "Built in 1695," will probably be preserved as a museum too. [Illustration: An Old House in Flatbush.]