Wolferts Roost and Miscellanies | Page 3

imprinted upon new-year cakes, and devoured with eager relish by
holiday urchins; a great oyster-house bore the name of "Knickerbocker
Hall;" and I narrowly escaped the pleasure of being run over by a
Knickerbocker omnibus!
Proud of having associated with a man who had achieved such
greatness, I now recalled our early intimacy with tenfold pleasure, and
sought to revisit the scenes we had trodden together. The most
important of these was the mansion of the Van Tassels, the Roost of the
unfortunate Wolfert. Time, which changes all things, is but slow in its
operations upon a Dutchman's dwelling. I found the venerable and
quaint little edifice much as I had seen it during the sojourn of Diedrich.
There stood his elbow-chair in the corner of the room he had occupied;
the old-fashioned Dutch writing-desk at which he had pored over the
chronicles of the Manhattoes; there was the old wooden chest, with the
archives left by Wolfert Acker, many of which, however, had been
fired off as wadding from the long duck gun of the Van Tassels. The
scene around the mansion was still the same; the green bank; the spring
beside which I had listened to the legendary narratives of the historian;
the wild brook babbling down to the woody cove, and the
overshadowing locust trees, half shutting out the prospect of the great
Tappan Zee.
As I looked round upon the scene, my heart yearned at the recollection
of my departed friend, and I wistfully eyed the mansion which he had
inhabited, and which was fast mouldering to decay. The thought struck
me to arrest the desolating hand of Time; to rescue the historic pile
from utter ruin, and to make it the closing scene of my wanderings; a
quiet home, where I might enjoy "lust in rust" for the remainder of my
days. It is true, the fate of the unlucky Wolfert passed across my mind;
but I consoled myself with the reflection that I was a bachelor, and that
I had no termagant wife to dispute the sovereignty of the Roost with
me.
I have become possessor of the Roost! I have repaired and renovated it
with religious care, in the genuine Dutch style, and have adorned and

illustrated it with sundry reliques of the glorious days of the New
Netherlands. A venerable weathercock, of portly Dutch dimensions,
which once battled with the wind on the top of the Stadt-House of New
Amsterdam, in the time of Peter Stuyvesant, now erects its crest on the
gable end of my edifice; a gilded horse in full gallop, once the
weathercock of the great Vander Heyden Palace of Albany, now glitters
in the sunshine, and veers with every breeze, on the peaked turret over
my portal; my sanctum sanctorum is the chamber once honored by the
illustrious Diedrich, and it is from his elbow-chair, and his identical old
Dutch writing-desk, that I pen this rambling epistle.
Here, then, have I set up my rest, surrounded by the recollections of
early days, and the mementoes of the historian of the Manhattoes, with
that glorious river before me, which flows with such majesty through
his works, and which has ever been to me a river of delight.
I thank God I was born on the banks of the Hudson! I think it an
invaluable advantage to be born and brought up in the neighborhood of
some grand and noble object in nature; a river, a lake, or a mountain.
We make a friendship with it, we in a manner ally ourselves to it for
life. It remains an object of our pride and affections, a rallying point, to
call us home again after all our wanderings. "The things which we have
learned in our childhood," says an old writer, "grow up with our souls,
and unite themselves to it." So it is with the scenes among which we
have passed our early days; they influence the whole course of our
thoughts and feelings; and I fancy I can trace much of what is good and
pleasant in my own heterogeneous compound to my early
companionship with this glorious river. In the warmth of my youthful
enthusiasm, I used to clothe it with moral attributes, and almost to give
it a soul. I admired its frank, bold, honest character; its noble sincerity
and perfect truth. Here was no specious, smiling surface, covering the
dangerous sand-bar or perfidious rock; but a stream deep as it was
broad, and bearing with honorable faith the bark that trusted to its
waves. I gloried in its simple, quiet, majestic, epic flow; ever straight
forward. Once, indeed, it turns aside for a moment, forced from its
course by opposing mountains, but it struggles bravely through them,
and immediately resumes its straightforward march. Behold, thought I,

an emblem