houses. All prisoners were taken either to the City Hall or to the Eldridge Street jail.

"Under such a government, or lack of government, the disorders and ruffianism which characterized the city had grown to an alarming extent. As soon as the stores were shut rowdies began to congregate on the street corners and about the low hotels and groggeries. The most peaceable passer-by could not hope to escape their insults, not always their violence. Broadway was so infested that no person could pass through it after nightfall in safety. A more shameful though less dangerous disturbance was produced by the disorderly women who thronged the public thoroughfares and carried on their infamous traffic with utter shamelessness, insulting almost every passer-by with their obscene jests, their horrible profanity, and their loud and boisterous songs and laughter. No lady could venture into the streets alone; no companionship even could prevent her from gross and repeated insults. There was no system of street-cleaning. If there had been any ordinance against throwing garbage into the streets there were no police to enforce it. It was a common if not universal practice. The public thoroughfares reeked with a filth which was positively appalling. In a word, New York enjoyed and deserved the reputation of being at once the most prosperous and the worst governed city in the world. In 1842 Charles Dickens visited this country. His pictures of New York City in the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit' cease to appear like exaggerations."

Such was New York City when, returning from his first trip to Europe, my father came home in 1843 to find his wife on her death-bed and to follow to her grave the mother and her new-born babe, laid in the same casket. Before he had left for Europe in the spring he had acceded to the urgency of a younger brother, Gorham, to join him in establishing in New York City a school for the higher education of girls. The death of my mother made continuing the literary work in the morning and the landscape gardening in the afternoon at Little Blue impossible to my father.

He packed up the few things

he wished to take with him to the city, sent many of my mother's things, which he could neither keep nor sell, to her only sister, married and living at Worcester, Massachusetts, left my youngest brother Edward with his Aunt Sallucia, living with her father opposite

Little Blue, in Farmington, Maine, and, taking with him his other three boys, Benjamin Vaughan, Austin, and myself, started for New York.

He

At the time he wrote to his sister, "I think they will not soon forget their mother." was right. They never did. And in a pathetic self-revelation, the more pathetic to me as I read it now because of his habitual reserve, he wrote: "For myself, I can only keep away from my mind the terrible realization of that last fatal night, the days of distress and anguish unspeakable which followed—and the gloomiest thoughts and anticipations of the future-by means of incessant occupation, busying continually with endless details which under other circumstances would be a wearisome burden.”

His city home was at first in Morton Street, in old Greenwich. The school building, I believe, was first in Bleecker Street, but my earliest recollection of it is on the corner of Houston and Mulberry Streets. Two other brothers, John S. C. and Charles E., joined Jacob and Gorham in the new enterprise, which was a surprising success from the very beginning-one of the earlier of the movements for woman's better education which later led up to the woman's colleges and woman's admission to the great universities. My personal recollection of the school in its various quarters—Bleecker Street, Houston Street, Lafayette Place, Greene Street-is of the vaguest; but I have found in the family records a letter from my Uncle John to his mother in Farmington which gives a vivid picture of a girls' school in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. This contemporaneous account I print here as a part of my narrative in lieu of my less trustworthy and much less distinct reminiscences. It indicates that "strenuous life" existed long before the phrase had been made current.

"New York, December 9th, 1845.

after breakfast we return to the parlor, and after singing a hymn, aided by Jane seated at the organ, we have family prayers. We hardly leave the room after family prayers before the pupils begin to come. First two or three come, then a dozen press in at the door, and then they come pouring in like the tides of the Ocean, until our yard and halls and rooms are filled with merry groups. Here is a lady sitting in the Reception Room, with two frightened daughters who have come to enter the school. Here is an agent with half a dozen books which he wishes us to examine and introduce into the school. Here is a gentleman who has called to settle the tuition bill of his daughter. The printer's boy is waiting in the hall for a proof from Mr. Jacob. In the midst of the apparent clamor a bell sounds in the hall, intimating that it is five minutes of nine o'clock. The young ladies immediately repair to their seats, and at precisely nine a stroke of the bell raises the study card in every room, hushes the noise to perfect silence, and the school in all its departments is opened with prayer. Then come the recitations. Here go a party of sixty young ladies up into the fifth story to a large lecture-room, to recitation. They go along in single file, pressing against the bannister that they may accommodate another party of forty or fifty who, also in single file, are pressing down the stairs from a lecture. Jane has her shawl on to go to market and get all the provisions for a dinner for twenty-five persons; she is talking with two or three ladies in the parlor who have called to visit the school, and also with a gentleman who has come to enquire if she can take his daughter into the family to board. She must furnish a new room, and is going from the market to purchase some carpets and other furniture; and is also to call upon a lady to enquire the character of a fifth girl whom she must engage to do the family work. She has just told Delany where to put the wood and coal in the cellar; and has been reprimanding the grocer for sending her some bad apples. Charles Nye also needs a new jacket, which she must purchase.

"A gentleman calls me away from my class to enquire if I can help edit a newspaper in the city; while I am talking with him another calls to enquire if I can supply their pulpit the next Sabbath. So I tell Jane that she must for a few moments excuse herself from the company in the parlor and take charge of a class of sixty young ladies in French.

Jane very obediently goes to the lectureroom, and mounted on a stand before the blackboard gives out the French. The editor wants to hire the use of my name. He says that he can do all the work, but if I will allow him to put down my name as editor he will give me two hundred dollars for this year and probably considerably more for the next.

"The hours of the morning rapidly roll away amidst a round of most incessant calls; each member of the family being pulled in a dozen different ways each moment. At eleven we have recess and lunch. The school closes at quarter before two, and then for about an hour the halls and yards are filled with groups, some playing, some going home, some lingering at their books, carriages are standing at the door to take pupils home, visitors are walking through the apartments. About three o'clock the house is empty of the scholars and we feel quite alone, as we have then only about twenty-five in the family. There are then some purchases of books or stationery to be made down in town, two miles and a half from where we live. Jacob is in his study holding a government meeting of the teachers in the boys' school. I jump into the omnibus and go and make some purchases to the amount of forty or fifty dollars, and hasten home to dinner. At five o'clock the dinner bell rings. The shutters are closed and the lighted lamps are on the table. We all assemble in the dining-room. The boys are laughing and chattering at one end of the table. The gentlemen and young ladies at the other are jabbering in French.

"After dinner we separate; it is then about six o'clock. Some are in the parlor playing on the organ. Company is calling. Some are in the large room which we call the study, about 40 feet long by 20 feet wide, marching, as one of the young ladies plays upon the piano. And the younger ones are begging Mr. John to tell a story. At seven o'clock (for we have no tea, dinner and tea being united in one meal) the large hall bell rings and all assemble around the table in the study, where some draw, some write letters, and where I am at the present moment writing. In the meantime the door bell is continually ringing, as a class in French assembles under Mr. Villeplait's instruction in one of the large school-rooms, and a number of other persons call on various business, who are received in the Reception Room, which is reserved for company. Evening study hours continue until half-past eight.

At nine o'clock the hall bell rings, and those who have not retired and who are not specially engaged, then assemble for prayers. Such are our ordinary days in New York, only a little more so. We have got so full here that we have decided to start a branch uptown. Gorham takes charge of it. He commenced to-day with forty pupils, a delegation from this school. Charles also has his heart fixed upon a boys' school in Norwich to open in May next. We expect Miss Dunlap, now in Miss English's school in Georgetown, to be here this week as a teacher. I have got, my dear Mother, to the end of my sheet. It may be pleasant for you from your quiet corner to take this peep into the Babel in which your children live. But we get accustomed to anything. And Jane and I are moving quietly along under a load of cares which we should once have thought would have driven us mad. With very affectionate remembrances to all the family, and with no remaining space on my paper even to speak of your health, I am, "Your affectionate and busy son,

"JOHN S. C. ABBOTT.

"P. S.-I keep school all the week; preach every Sabbath and on Thursday evenings, write weekly for the Evangelist,' and am writing a book on Astronomy. Father, I am not rusting out, positively."

When I came to New York in 1849 to enter the New York University, the school had made its last removal. My Uncle Charles had left it two or three years before and had opened a school for boys in Norwich, Connecticut, where I had fitted for college. My Uncle Gorham had withdrawn and taken forty of the older pupils with him, with his brother's entire approbation, and had established a separate school which became Spingler Institute.

The Abbott School had a double habitation, my Uncle John keeping the boarding pupils in his home in Colonnade Row, Lafayette Place, my father living in a house which he had bought in Greene Street near Eighth Street, which served as the schoolhouse both for the day and boarding pupils. Some important changes in the city government had also taken place. In one of those spasms of reform which periodically attack New York City Mr. James Harper had been elected Mayor, and in two years of administration (1844-46) had effected some radical reforms, in spite of the hostile influence which such reforms have always had to

combat and which succeeded in defeating his re-election in 1846, though the inevitable relapse did not come until the election as Mayor of Fernando Wood in 1854. During this period, 1849-1854, I was living a quasibohemian life in New York City.

The best residential portion of the city extended from Bleecker to Fourteenth Street. When my Uncle Gorham withdrew from the Abbott School and opened the Spingler Institute in Union Square in 1848, he was so far uptown that croakers prophesied that the school could not possibly succeed. The Brick Church was still on Park Row opposite the City Hall Park, Dr. Cuyler was preaching in the section east of Chatham Square where the fine residences formerly had been, the Harlem River was the northern boundary of the political city, but Harlem was for all social and most business purposes a separate town, and Yorkville on the east and Bloomingdale on the west were still regarded as separate communities. The present Central Park was worse than a wilderness, peopled by tribes of squatters and overrun with goats. The Elysian Fields in Hoboken served the purpose of a great recreation ground for the common people. P. T. Barnum got possession of a part of these fields for a day, arranged for a buffalo hunt in the style of a Wild West Show, chartered the ferryboat to Hoboken, and then announced a free show, with the result that the crowded ferries at five or ten cents ferriage yielded him a handsome profit. And although the show simply consisted in driving some rather tame buffaloes around a ten-acre plot, everybody was satisfied-for the show was free, and who could grumble at a free show?

In

The New York and New Haven main railway station was where Madison Square Garden now stands; but there was a downtown station in Canal Street just off Broadway, and four horses pulled the passenger cars uptown to the great station, where the locomotive was attached to the train. going to Washington we changed cars at Philadelphia, and were carried across the city in horse cars; were ferried across the Delaware River, where now we cross on a bridge; and were drawn, without change of cars, through the streets of Baltimore, a guard standing on the front platform and blowing a horn to warn vehicles that might be in the way. Within New York City transportation was afforded by lumbering stage-coaches, one line running from Greenwich Village