I am going to talk about a new York Sunday (a Sabbath day ,not a soda water confection).

When I was a little girl, in 1867-1868, the upper part of Manhattan island, on the west or
Hudson River side and north of 59th Street, was suburban.

There was one line of street cars that penetrated "through the quiet" at stated intervals (but never on schedule time) to the jingling of not unmusical harness bells. The route was up Eighth Avenue, and Eighth Avenue skirted the west side of Central park, as it does today, and Central Park was in 1867 a comparatively new city acquisition.

There was also once in every two or three hours (I think it was from six in the morning until six at night) a stage line that followed the windings of the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) through Bloomingdale, Manhattanville, Carmansville and on to Washington Heights.

It might be interesting to mention en passant that the people who used these street cars and stages were mostly known to one another, not perhaps personally, but as belonging to the same country-side neighborhood.

As an instance of this fact, I recall a tall, dark, sallow man, who always wore a cloak and who was a tea merchant. He was a brother of Susan B. Anthony and, as Miss Anthony was then considered to be a young woman of startlingly progressive ideas, we children gazed upon her brother with interest.

Then along the Bloomingdale Road there lived a colony of actors, and Mr. Joseph Jefferson's little daughter, who afterward married the English novelist, Fairjohn, was almost like going to the theatre to ride beside in the car or the stage.

The stages only ran on week days, for an old observance of the Sabbath was still held in half remembrance in New York. Of course, there had been a great change since 1830, for in his book, "The Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York," my father says: "When the church bells had ceased tolling and services were about to commence, havy iron chains were drawn tightly across
the streets containing the "Houses of Worship" and only the doctor's gig, on an errand of mercy, was allowed to pass through the barred roadway"; and again he says: "Sometimes on a lovely summer afternoon a brave sinner would get out his carriage and pair for a drive from town into the country, knowing that for this lapse, and an indefinite period thereafter, he would be a subject for intercession at family evening prayers."

To go back tot he stage route in 1867, by the time 60th Street was reached the Bloomingdale Road and the contiguouis neighborhood became country stretches of land, filled with lovely homes, many of them like Marshall Hall at 92nd Street, having been the country seats of representative New York families since pre-Revolutionary times.

Will you go back with me to a June Sunday morning in 1867? When the bell in the tower on Mt. Morris Hill in Harlem rang out a quarter to nine, we children, arrayed in our best "bibs and tuckers," started church ward. Oh! that old tower bell, let it tell us the story of its life: "I was cast in Holland over the sea in Sixteen Hundred and Thirty-three. Centuries have passed over me since first I was rocked in the tall belfry of St. Nicholas' Church by the Zuyder Zee." We must not let the garrulous old bell take too much of our time and so we must pass by the incidents of many years until we come to the portion of the narrative which says:

"On Whitehall Street, there once did stand a quaint Dutch house that did command much praise for its garden that seems to be a regular hit of old Hollandrie, with its clipped box border and cedar tree and its tulips galore of gaudy hues, but the humble bees did always choose the Clover Inns for their gossip and news.

"A parsonage wedding it was, that set the Burghers thinking that they must get a proper place to worship and pray. It was upon this bridal day that the Dominie's daughter, young and fair, pink of cheek and sunny of hair, said tot he guests assembled there: "Friends, I now before you stand, and ask a gift from every hand. Come, build you a church in this new land.' So the Burghers opened their pouches to pay for a church named St. Nicholas on that day."

The legend goes on to tell how, when the news reached Holland, it was decided to send as a gift to the new church in the new world, the bell from the mother church of St. Nicholas by the Zuyder Zee.

Then the bell goes on to say: "So they sent me from Holland to toll the knell of souls that had departed well, to wake the sleepers at break of day, to sound the curfew, to call to the fray, but most to sing out for one and all: "To worship!! to worship come! Heed my call!"

More years rolled away and the little cluster of houses along the Battery's Stockade had grown from a village and spread out into a thriving town, and away up northward a colony of adventurous Holland folk had formed a new settlement and called it by a beloved home name_Harlem.

It was then that this bell was taken down from the steeple of the abandoned St. Nicholas' Church on the Bay and placed in the tower that had been built on the top of the highest hill on Manhattan Island, and there for many life generations it had hung, doing faithful duty through spring time and autumn, through summer and winter. It kept the village clock in accord. It woke the sleepers (far and near) at dawn. It sent the good folk to bed on the stroke of nine (the hour prescribed for each thrifty house frau to sprinkle ashes over the red hearth logs, and then to blow out the candle). The bell warned strolling sweethearts to speed home (ere the
"watch," solemnly twirling his huge wooden rattle, should fulfill his bounden duty and drive them before him). It commanded mein Host of the Tavern to send into the night the village Rip Van Winkles and it bade the one general shopkeeper to put up the shutters. When the tower clock tolled nine, the grand dame stopped the whirring of her wheel and all was still, save mayhap the voice of some mother singing a wakeful child to sleep:

"Trip a trop a traunches,
De varken in de braunches,
De conjes in de claver
De pardens in de harver,
De enjes in de vater plass,
So gute mein klina joris vass;"

and this old bed-time lullaby was sung to generations of New York Children.

In his autobiography, our Theodore Roosevelt says: "My grandmother taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby song, of which the first line ran: 'Trippe Troppa tronches.' I always remembered it and when I was in East Africa, it proved a bond of union between me and the Boer settlers, not a few of whom knew it, although at first they always had difficulty in understanding my pronunciation, at which I do not wonder. It was interesting to meet these men, whose ancestors had gone to the Capoe about the time that mine went to America (two centuries and a half previously) and to find that the descendants of these two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children the same nursery song."

This was one of my nursery songs, and the translation that I, as a little child, gave to my mind, I think was about as follows:

"Rock a bye my baby,
And into dreamland go.
The birdies on the branches
Have gone to sleep I Know.
The calf amid the clover
Has fallen fast asleep.
The coaltie in the barn yard
Is wrapped in slumber deep,
And even the little fishes
Are dreaming peacefully
In their houses in the water
That no body can see.
So bye to precious baby, My own dear little boy,
Your mother's precious darling,
Your father's greatest joy."

It must be realized, after all this detailed explanation, that the old bell up in the Mt. Morris tower, even if its story was but a legend, had a claim to our reverence and was to us children no "Tinkling Symbol."

All the way to church, from mild springtime to Indian summer days, we passed along a winding road, holding on either side homes with gardens about them, and the white wooden fence palings were wide enough apart to afford opportunity for the reaching through and touching with gentle hands the petals of the great fragrant roses, the honey suckle cups and the innumerable other fragrant flowers that hedged in each little domain from the
outer world.

When the weather was particularly fair and balmy, we took a cross cut through our own and our neighbors' orchards and fields, and so came upon the old battlefield of Harlem Heights, flanking the valley, in which nestled the village of Manhattanville (now west 125th Street).

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