Where Manhattan reigned of old Long before the age of gold In the fair encircled isle Formed for beauty's warmest smile. _William Crow_ * * * In the beginning of May they entered the Hudson, found a "Frenchman" lying in the mouth of the river, who would erect the arms of the King of France there, but the Hollanders would not permit him, opposing it by commission from the Lord's States General and the Directors of the West India Company, and "in order not to be frustrated therein, they convoyed the Frenchman out of the rivers." This having been done, they sailed up the Maikans, 140 miles, near which they built and completed a fort, named "Orange," with four bastions, on an island, by them called "Castle Island." This was probably the island below Castleton, now known as Baern Island, where the first white child was born on the Hudson. In another volume we read that "a colony was planted in 1625 on the Manhetes Island, where a fort was staked out by Master Kryn Fredericke, an engineer. The counting-house is kept in a stone building thatched with reed; the other houses are of the bark of trees. There are thirty ordinary houses on the east side of the river, which runs nearly north and south." This is the description of New York City when Charles the First was King. * * * Behold the natural advantages of our State; the situation of our principal seaport; the facility that the Sound affords for an intercourse with the East, and the noble Hudson which bears upon its bosom the wealth of the remotest part of the State. _Robert R. Livingston._ * * * [Illustration: OLOFFE VAN KORTLANDT'S DREAM.] Moreover, we should not forget that Communipaw outranks New York in antiquity, and, according to Knickerbocker, whose quiet humor is always read and re-read with pleasure, might justly be considered the Mother Colony. For lo! the sage Oloffe Van Kortlandt dreamed a dream, and the good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, and descended upon the island of Manhattan and sat himself down and smoked, "and the smoke ascended in the sky, and formed a cloud overhead; and Oloffe bethought him, and he hastened and climbed up to the top of one of the tallest trees, and saw that the smoke spread over a great extent of country; and, as he considered it more attentively, he fancied that the great volume assumed a variety of marvelous forms, where, in dim obscurity, he saw shadowed out palaces and domes and lofty spires, all of which lasted but a moment, and then passed away." So New York, like Alba Longa and Rome, and other cities of antiquity, was under the immediate care of its tutelar saint. Its destiny was foreshadowed, for now the palaces and domes and lofty spires are real and genuine, and something more than dreams are made of. * * *