This embittered him against the city as a personal enemy. Having accepted the Westchester standpoint as to the farmers’ rights, every motive and activity of everybody south of the Harlem River was an added tyranny. Chalender and his crowd might accuse the farmers of pettiness because they would not surrender their fields to the thirsty myriads of the city. But RoBards felt that this was only a new campaign in the eternal combat between town and country. He felt that if certain kinds of mankind had their way, every stream would be chained to a wheel, every field would contain a tenement or a shop. A snuff factory and a linen bleachery had all too long disgraced the lower stretches of the Bronx. New York was pushing its beautiful wheatfields further and further north. The old pond, called “The Collect” (and well pronounced “the colic”) had long since been drained to a swamp and replaced by the hideous crime-nest of The Five Points. The waters that ran through Canal Street were hidden gradually from the light of day as a covered sewer. Taverns and gin hells had taken root in the outlying regions above Madison Square, and the distant roads were noisy with horse races, brandy guzzling, and riotous conversation. Even on the Sabbath the New Yorkers sent their wives to church and went out into the fields for unholy recreation. RoBards entered the lists as the champion of the rights of God’s free soil. New York was to him a vast octopus thrusting its grisly tentacles deep into the fairest realms to suck them dry and cover them with its own slime. If it were not checked, it would drive all the farmers from Manhattan Island. The real estate speculators talked of a day when the city would be all city up to the Harlem River, as if that time would be a millennium instead of a pandemonium. Seeing his ardor and hearing his eloquence, more and more of the Westchester patriots engaged RoBards as their attorney. His battle ground was the Chancery Court, where the fate of the lands was settled. He lost every case. The city’s claim to water was ruled paramount to any American citizen’s rights to his own land. RoBards might cry that New York was repeating the very tyranny that had brought on the Revolution against England. He might protest that the Revolutionary heroes of Westchester had incarnadined their own hills with their blood in vain, if the greed of New Amsterdam were to wrest their homes from them after all. But the judges only smiled or yawned at his fervor. They would discuss nothing but the price to be paid for the condemned property, and RoBards could do nothing but sell his clients’ lands dear and delay the final defeat as long as he could.