These New England folk found New York already aping metropolitanism--with its unshaded streets and its tightly built rows of houses. Over on Long island across busy Fulton ferry it was different. There must have been something in the early Brooklyn, with its gentle shade-trees down the streets and its genial air of quiet comfort that made the New Englanders think of the pretty Massachusetts and Connecticut towns that they had left. For into Brooklyn they came--a steady stream which did not lessen in volume until the days of the Civil War. They gave the place a blood infusion that it needed. They crowded the old Dutch families to one side and laid the social foundations of the Brooklyn of today. It was New England who founded the excellent private schools and small colleges of Brooklyn, who early gave to her a public-school system of wide reputation. It was New England who sprinkled the Congregational churches over the older Brooklyn, who gave to their pulpits a Talmage and a Storrs, who brought Henry Ward Beecher out from the wilds of the Mid-west and made him the most famous preacher that America has ever known. It was New England who for forty years made Brooklyn Heights--with its exquisite situation on a plateau overlooking the upper harbor of New York--the finest residential locality in the land. It was New England for almost all that time who filled the great churches of the Heights to their capacity Sabbath morning after Sabbath morning--New England who stood for high thought, decent living and real progress in Brooklyn. It was New England that made Brooklyn eat her pork and beans religiously each Sabbath eve. The great churches and the fine houses still stand on Brooklyn Heights, but alas, there are few struggles at the church-doors any more on Sabbath morning. The old houses, the fine, gentle old houses--many of them--have said good-by to their masters, their gayeties and their glories. Some of them have been pulled down to make room for gingerbread apartment structures and some of those that have remained have suffered degradation as lodging- and as boarding-houses. It has been hard to hold the younger generation of fashionable Brooklyn in Brooklyn. Manhattan is too near, too alluring with all of its cosmopolitan airs, and these days there is another steady hegira across the East river--the first families of Brooklyn seeking residence among the smart streets of upper Manhattan.