“Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labour and to wait.” LONGFELLOW. The spring of the year I was twenty, Dirck and myself paid our first visit to town, in the characters of young men. Although Satanstoe was not more than five-and-twenty miles from New York, by the way of King's-Bridge, the road we always travelled in order to avoid the ferry, it was by no means as common to visit the capital as it has since got to be. I know gentlemen who pass in and out from our neighbourhood, now, as often as once a fortnight, or even once a week; but thirty years since this was a thing very seldom done. My dear mother always went to town twice a year; in the spring to pass Easter week, and in the autumn to make her winter purchases. My father usually went down four times, in the course of the twelve months, but he had the reputation of a gadabout, and was thought by many people to leave home quite as much as he ought to do. As for my grandfather, old age coming on, he seldom left home now, unless it were to pay stated visits to certain old brother campaigners who lived within moderate distances, and with whom he invariably passed weeks each summer. The visit I have mentioned occurred some time after Easter, a season of the year that many of our country families were in the habit of passing in town, to have the benefit of the daily services of Old Trinity, as the Hebrews resorted to Jerusalem to keep the feast of the passover. My mother did not go to town this year, on account of my father's gout, and I was sent to supply her place with my aunt Legge, who had been so long accustomed to have one of the family with her at that season, that I was substituted. Dirck had relatives of his own, with whom he staid, and thus every thing was rendered smooth. In order to make a fair start, my friend crossed the Hudson the week before, and, after taking breath at Satanstoe for three days, we left the Neck for the capital, mounted on a pair of as good roadsters as were to be found in the county: and that is saying a good deal; for the Morrises, and de Lanceys, and Van Cortlandts all kept racers, and sometimes gave us good sport, in the autumn, over the county course. West Chester, to say no more than she deserved, was a county with a spirited gentry, and one of which no colony need be ashamed.