In keeping with these sylvan and rustic scenes were the native owners. They disdained the waste of time involved in the frequent change of dress; appearing in the same costume, morning and evening. Nothing could be in greater contrast than the simple toilets of these proprietors of the island of Manhattan and their painted successors of our own day. The few men who owned the 141,486 lots into which the surface of New York City is now triturated, seemed, in the plainness of their attire and manners, to be only squatters upon a territory not their own, nor carried their feathered heads half as high as the modern trader in tape and calico, squeezed into a space often only sixteen feet and eight inches wide by one hundred deep. Children were kept in due subordination. Instead of attending parties or clubs, they were quietly hung upon a nail at the door of the wigwam; the heir of a square mile being suspended in unwhimpering silence, until his grave progenitors took their fill of nuts and sleep. There were no complaints of taxes, dirty streets, very common councils, or cheating at elections. The uncertainty and tediousness of legal proceedings were unknown. The plaintiff was his own attorney, jury, judge, and sheriff; deciding the case summarily, and doing execution on the defendant between sunset and sunrise. Lingering only a few days among these primitive inhabitants,—shooting game, doubtless, from the ancient trees occupying the very spot at the corner of Nassau and Wall Streets, where, in less than one hundred and eighty years afterwards, the first Federal Congress met, where, four years after that meeting, Washington was inaugurated President, and where, a few generations later, more money was daily disbursed than would have sufficed to buy all the then settlements of America, Hudson turned his little craft of eighty tons up the river which has since borne his name. Banks, since famous for historic events; or wed to literary matings, happy and dear, attracted for forty leagues his pleased attention. Wealth and taste have since embossed cities, towns, cultured villas, and grounds upon these shores; fringed them with varied foliage native and exotic, and thrown over them all the lace-like illusions of legends, stories, poetic fancies, and fairy-tales; but to the simple, honest eyes of Hudson nothing had ever presented itself more wonderful than that ever unrolling panorama of wood and wave, dripping with the intense and varied colors with which nature saturates and transfigures our autumnal woods.