"Very far away Federal Hall seems to-day as I sit at Aunt's window and gaze out into the street full of chaises and passing pedestrians--The grim stone Pompeys on the garden gates seem to mock at me a simple country girl bound in this hot-bed of fashion for another fortnight--Oh my tenderest Diana how I long for the fresh green of the countryside to give the balm of solitude to my fluttering heart--Ogling and pretty spoken gentlemen New York has in abundance but a girl in my situation no longer cares for a string of gallants--You, my dearest consoler have guessed my secret that he loves me--How can I describe to you his eyes, his hair, his voice, when it is such perfect bliss to pen he loves me...." [Illustration: HOW CAN I DESCRIBE TO YOU HIS EYES, HIS HAIR, HIS VOICE] A great red brick mansion in Chambers Street, guarded by two sentinel-like elm-trees and a tall iron fence; a sidewalk filled with the fashionables of Gotham starting for the afternoon Battery promenade; and up behind the eye-like panes of one of the haughty, staring windows a maiden dreaming over her pen. There is the picture. A demure little country Phyllis, visiting her august city relatives for the first time, has found herself in two strange worlds--fashion and love. In the extract taken from her letter written to a home confidante is the key to a forgotten romance of old New York. Love! the key to all the romances since the world began. "He loves me," she writes, the time-worn phrase every true daughter of Eve has hoped to whisper to herself or cry out to the multitudes, and we feel the thrill of those faded but impassioned words as in imagination we open the gates of that old-time mansion and enter into the year of 1807. New York society, which seems to undergo a complete revision every quarter of a century, has entirely changed since the name of Moore meant as much to the metropolis as that of Biddle to Philadelphia or Carroll to Baltimore. At the time of which I write, when the first numbers of the "Salmagundi Papers" were startling North River aristocrats, fields lay beyond the new St. John's Church, and Canal Street was looked upon by the sagacious as the probable Mecca for retail commerce. Jeremy Cockloft, the younger, gives us a glimpse of the residence portion of the city in "The Stranger at Home, or a Tour of Broadway." "Broadway--great difference in the gentility of streets; a man who resides in Pearl-Street, or Chatham-Row, derives no kind of dignity from his domicile, but place him in a certain part of Broadway--anywhere between the Battery and Wall-Street, and he straightway becomes entitled to figure in the beau monde, and struts as a person of prodigious consequence."