The owner and master of the “Elsa” was one of those rare and welcome comrades who promise less than they perform; and when he lured us from our resting-place at Greenport for a summer voyage in the wake of Captain Kidd, he did not tell us that the homeward sail was to give us pleasant introduction to Fisher's and Shelter Islands, two sea-girt nooks, where linger delightful memories of the colonial era.

Nine miles in length and varying from half a mile to a mile and a quarter in width, the first of these islands lies like a breastwork at the entrance to the Sound. Its history, like that of Gardiner's Island, is bound up with that of a distinguished American family, for it was granted in 1668 to John Winthrop, the younger, eldest son of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, and himself governor of the colony of Connecticut. John Winthrop, the younger, built a manor-house on his island estate, and dwelt there until his death, in 1676, at the age of seventy. Fisher's Island descended to his eldest son, and when the latter died without male heir, in 1707, became the property of his aptly-named brother Wait Still Winthrop, chief-justice of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, in the possession of whose descendants it remained for a hundred and sixty years.

More recently it has passed into other hands, and is divided at present into several farms. However, one relic of the Winthrops remains, their handsome old manor-house, — now much enlarged from its original size, — with its thick stone walls and huge dormer-windows breaking the gray-shingled monotony of its high gabled roof. Nor does the island lack other reminders of a bygone time. Amid the long sea-grass and by a small rock, blackened with soddened sea-moss, which marks one of the loneliest spots on its south shore, lies the grave of a man there washed up, who lost his life in attempting on a dark night nearly nine-score years ago to swim across the Connecticut River. According to tradition the young pastor — for it was the Rev. Samuel Pierpont, of the First Church, of Lyme — was returning to his bride. He did not find the ferryman, and anxious both on his own account and that of his wife, he essayed to cross by swimming. His life went out in the night and the darkness, and weeks later his body was washed ashore on Fisher's Island, where naught now disturbs his lonely sepulchre.

Time was when the nearest neighbor to the southward of the Winthrops, of Fisher's Island, was the lord and owner of Sylvester's, now called Shelter, Island. It was in 1652 that Nathaniel Sylvester, one of a wealthy royalist family driven from England by the undoing of the first Charles, brought Grissell Brinley, his bride, to Shelter Island, which he and his brother had lately purchased for “sixteen hundred pounds of good Muscovada sugar,” building there a comfortable manor-house, which a little later became a place of refuge for the Quakers driven from Massachusetts by the authorities of that colony. George Fox was twice a guest of the Sylvesters, and preached to the Indians from the door-steps of their hospitable home.

That is how it came to be called Shelter Island, descending in the third generation to Brinley Sylvester, of Newport, who elected to dwell in the place of his fathers and built a new house on the site of the original homestead. This house, erected in 1737, and known as the Sylvester Manor, is now owned and occupied by the widow and daughters of the late Eben Norton Horsford, who are lineal descendants of Nathaniel and Grissell Sylvester. It is reached by a mile drive from the western shore through a rolling country and over well-shaded roads. On each side of the entrance to the house are two small brass cannon glinting in the sunshine, and on the wide door is a heavy brass knocker. Lift this and a cordial welcome is assured you, for its owners delight to show the old house and its treasures to the visitor, — a piece of the cloth of gold presented by Captain Kidd to Madam Gardiner, the snuff-box that Lord Fairfax gave to Washington, veneered and inlaid furniture, spinning-wheels, coffin-like clocks, and many other things quaint and deeply interesting in their quaintness.

And so, after a day divided between Fisher's and Shelter Islands, we came back to Greenport, and idled there until the summer was ended and the time for our return to the workaday world was at hand. But Long Island throughout its length and breadth is rich in reminders of colonial and Revolutionary days, and thus it was that we planned a leisurely homeward journey, which, beginning at the Hamptons, gave us pleasurable glimpses of St. George's Manor, Patchogue, Huntingdon Harbor, Jericho, Oyster Bay, and Roslyn, and came to an end at Flushing. Settled in 1640 by men from Lynn, Massachusetts, the three Hamptons, South, Bridge, and East, had early and frequent disputes with the Dutch, who came down the island from New Amsterdam. First joined to the Hartford colony, they were later made a part of the domain granted by Charles II. to his brother, the Duke of York, their energetic protest against this transfer passing unheeded. “But,” in the words of the author of the ancient records of Southampton, “it requires something more than the patent of a king and the order of a governor to change the wishes, the thoughts, and the dispositions of a people, and from that day to the present Southampton has continued to be an integral part of New England to all intents and purposes, and in all modes of thought and action, as much as any portion of the land of steady habits.”

Seated in the lap of a wide, wind-swept plain, against the southern edge of which the ocean pounds with never-ceasing roar, Southampton's first prosperity came from the sea. The whale-fishery began early, and often the whales came so close to the shore that the fishermen could capture them from boats. Sometimes they became stranded and were cut up by their captors. In 1687 there were a dozen whaling crews of ten men, each doing business on this plan, and over two thousand barrels of oil were secured in that year. Following the introduction of mineral oils, however, the whaling industry declined as rapidly as it had risen, and during the first three-quarters of the present century idleness and quiet brooded over the moss-grown old hamlet by the sea. Now the tide of modern wealth has set in upon it; the old and the new jostle and mingle delightfully in the Southampton of to-day, and in a walk along its main street, lined all the way with splendid elms, one comes upon venerable landmarks like the old Sayre House, built in 1648, and handed down from father to son for ten generations, touching elbows with smart summer cottages of the most recent pattern. The palace of a new-made millionaire keeps company with the old Pelletreau House, where Lord Erskine made his head-quarters during the British occupation in 1779; a golf-link and a club-house are within sight of the ruins of the three forts which that nobleman cause to be erected, and along the shores of old Town Pond, transformed by recent comers into Lake Agawam, and over the Ox Pasture and Great Plains roads, thoroughness opened in the middle of the seventeenth century and flecked with windmills brought from Holland, the visitor drives by a hundred modern villas, the creation of yesterday. To the south of the town are the dunes for which this coast is famous, and beyond them the rollers break upon the beach with a roar that can be heard a mile away.

Three miles west of Southampton village the level moorland rises into the hills of Shinnecock, so named from the Indians who were the original owners of all the lands. In 1703 the Shinnecock region was leased back to the Indians by the settlers who had previously purchased lands from the tribe and was used as a reservation until 1859, when the hills were sold to a local corporation and the remnant of the tribe took up their abode on the Shinnecock Neck, where they still live to the number of about two hundred. These are a mixture of Indians and negro, the last full-blooded member of the tribe having died several years ago. The women till the soil and find employment among the cottagers and villagers, but the men hug the shady side of the house or hill, smoke, watch the women at work, and say nothing. The government furnishes them with a school-master and a preacher, but small influence have they to win the Indian from his contempt of labor, his pipe, and his taciturnity. The only thing taught him by the white man for which he has a liking is a keen relish for strong drink, and when in his cups he is said to be an ugly creature. In the main, however, the Shinnecocks are a silent and inoffensive people, gradually fading off the face of the earth.

Yet life among them has not been without its strange, mysterious tragedies. At the close of a summer day seventy-odd years ago a small sloop coming from the northward anchored near the shore of Peconic Bay. The only persons on the sloop who could be seen by the Indians fishing close at hand were a white man and a negro. After darkness had settled over the bay a light flickered from the cabin windows of the sloop, and a voice, that of a woman, was raised in song. In the early morning hours a noise was heard in the direction of the boat and a woman's screams floated out over the water. Then the listeners on shore heard the sound of the hoisting of an anchor, and a little later in the early morning light the sloop was seen speeding out to sea. Just before it disappeared a man standing in the stern threw something white overboard.

Among the watchers on shore was one Jim Turnbull, an Indian known as the Water Serpent. After a time Turnbull swam out to the white object still floating on the water. As he drew near he saw it was the body of a woman lying face downward. When Turnbull turned the body over he recognized the face at a glance. The woman's throat had been cut and a dagger thrust into her heart. Then he conveyed the body to the beach and, aided by his companions, buried it near the head of Peconic Bay. The clay following the woman's burial the Water Serpent disappeared. He was absent for several weeks, and when he came back to his home in Shinnecock Hills gave no hint of his wanderings. Years later, however, when he was about to die, his lips opened and told a fearful story.

During a winter's storm a few months before the murder in Peconic Bay the Water Serpent and several other members of his tribe had been wrecked on the Connecticut shore. The Water Serpent, alone escaping death in the waters, was found lying unconscious on the beach by a farmer named Turner, who carried him to his home near by, where the farmer's daughter, Edith, a beautiful girl, nursed him back to health. An Indian never forgets a kindness, and the Water Serpent was no exception to the rule. He did not see his young nurse again until he found her body floating in the waters of Peconic Bay. Following this discovery, he quickly made his way to the home of the girl, and found that she had eloped with an Englishman, a former officer in the British army. The Water Serpent told his story, and two of the girl's brothers went with him to her grave. They opened it at night, identified the body, and carried it away for burial beside that of the girl's mother.

The Water Serpent had seen the Englishman and remembered his face. With the farmer's sons he took up the search for the murderer, and finally traced him to a farmhouse near the village of Stamford. One day the Englishman was missed from his usual haunts, and months afterwards his body was found, in a thick piece of woodland, with a dagger plunged through the heart. It was the same dagger that the Water Serpent had found in the heart of Edith.

One of the winsome excursions open to the visitor to Southampton leads by way of Bridgehampton, smallest and least interesting of the Hamptons, to the ancient whaling port of Sag Harbor. The whaling propensities of the farmer-mariners of Long Island led them in their search for the big fish to cruise farther and farther each year from the shore. From building boats and towing the dead whales back to shore to be “tried out” they began to build ships and make voyages to the South and Arctic seas. This business centred at Sag Harbor, and at one time there were nearly fourscore whalers sailing from the little port. Everybody in Sag Harbor had shares in whaling vessels. A round three hundred men worked on her wharves and all the other men of the town went to sea. In 1847 a million dollars' worth of oil and whalebone was the spoil of the Sag Harbor fleet. Then came the quick decline in the whaling interests that followed the discovery and use of petroleum. Fire swept away a portion of the town; the finding of gold in California drew many of its adventurous seamen to the West, and the glory of Sag Harbor departed. The last whaling vessel was sold in 1862, and to-day its wharves are deserted and its streets are silent.

What with its want of life and trade and its handful of ancient mariners now fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, Sag Harbor belongs to the past, and the same is in a measure true of Easthampton, two miles east of it, until recently one of those fortunate towns that could not be reached by rail. Easthampton has a history dating back to 1650, and its single elm-shaded street abounds in relics of an earlier time. Many of the houses are of the last century, and one of them sheltered in boyhood John Howard Payne, author of “Home, Sweet Home.” In another Lyman Beecher lived while pastor of the old village church. Cooper is said to have laid the opening scenes of his “Sea Lions” near Easthampton, and the place is rich in other strange and stirring memories.

On an April day in 1840 there came an unusual visitor to Easthampton's solitary inn. The new-comer was a man of fifty, handsome, courtly, reserved, and both he and the servant who accompanied him spoke with a marked Scotch accent. They were assigned quarters by the innkeeper, and with him they remained five years. Then the servant went away, and the master found a home with a leading family of Easthampton. His means were ample and remittances reached him regularly through a chain of banks. The life he led in the quiet town was in every way a sweet and lovely one. He was the constant patron of the poor, the warm friend of all the boys in the village, prompt and foremost in every good work, and a regular attendant at church, contributing freely to the building of a pretty little chapel at Easthampton.

And yet for more than thirty years this singular man led the life of a hermit. But once in that time did he pass the limits of Easthampton, and that was to visit Southampton, only a few miles away. During all these years his identity remained unknown to those about him. John Wallace was the name he gave when he came to Easthampton, and John Wallace is the name you will find carved on the white slab that stands above his grave in the village cemetery. At rare intervals he would come from the post-office holding a letter in his hand and remark to the members of the family with whom he lived, “This is from my lady friend in Edinburgh.”

And this was the only hint he ever gave of his former life. He was eighty-one years old when he died on a stormy night in December, 1870. After he was gone his landlady wrote a letter describing his end, addressed it to “Mr. Wallace's Lady Friend, Edinburgh,” and despatched it through the New York bank by which the old man's remittances reached him. Months later there came a reply, brief, formal, and unfeeling, signed “Mr. Wallace's Lady Friend.” Years after, quite by accident, the mystery of the dead man's life came out. In 1840 the high sheriff of a great Scotch county was a certain man residing in Edinburgh. He was a bachelor of middle age, of upright life, benevolent impulses, the ever-generous friend of those in distress, and widely known and universally beloved on account of his good works. Of a sudden a grave crime was charged against him. One evening the lord high advocate visited a friend of the sheriff and told him that at ten o'clock next morning a warrant would be issued for the sheriff's arrest. That night the sheriff disappeared from Scotland, and a few weeks later John Wallace's long and lonely penance in the little village on Long Island had begun. Now it is ended, and he sleeps as peacefully in the Easthampton burial-ground as he would in the soil that gave him birth.

Their isolation was long the principal charm of the Hamptons. Now, however, the railroad, bringing the summer visitor in its train, has robbed them of this, and for a survival of the Long Island of colonial times one must go, as we did, to St. George's Manor, at the eastern end of the Great South Bay, which, for seven generations, or since the original grant from King William in 1693, has been the home and stead of the same family. The tract of land which this grant conveyed to Colonel William Smith, commonly called Tangier Smith, owing to the fact that he had once been governor of Tangier, Africa, under the British crown, originally comprised some forty thousand acres, lying between Moriches on the east and Patchogue on the west, the ocean on the south, and the Sound on the north. The manor has since shrunk sadly in size, but Smith's Point, as the slightly wooded headland closing the east end of the bay is called, has doubtless changed but little in two hundred years. Here during all that time the Smiths have had their home. In front of the manor-house, which faces the water, may still be traced the ruins of a fort erected by the British during the Revolution, and on the lawn reposes a giant iron caldron used to try out blubber in the days when whales were often sighted off-shore and a watch was regularly kept for them. The manor-house itself, facing the water, and the third upon the spot, was built in 1810, and is a fine specimen of the generous houses of that time. A spacious hall runs through it, with square and lofty rooms opening on either side. Much of the furniture is modern, but some of the pieces date from the last century, and a few things remain that came from England with the first lord of the manor, two hundred years ago. Close at hand is a burial-ground where rest all the heads of the Tangier Smith family since 1700. Some of the men were soldiers, some sailors, some lawyers, some men of affairs, but all returned to end their days on the manor. Successive divisions have now reduced it to a tract of seven thousand acres, yet its present masters can drive four miles in one direction without leaving their own woods, and there they lie, with their wives and such of their children as remained in the family nest. Some of the headstones in the little graveyard tell stories of their own, as, for instance, one to the memory of a young wife who died at the age of fifteen. Among the neighbors of the Smiths were the Floyds. William Smith, third of the name and line, was one day talking with his neighbor Floyd as to the proper amount of money the four girls of the Floyd family ought to inherit. Judge Floyd said he had put them down in his will for one thousand pounds apiece, a large sum in those days, — much too large, in the opinion of Judge Smith, who declared that women had no idea of the value of money.

One of the daughters of the house of Floyd overheard the conversation, and it resulted in such friction between the young people of the two families that when young John Smith came a courting Miss Betsy Floyd her mother refused to hear of the match, and Betsy, like a dutiful daughter, obeyed. When Judge Floyd died it was found that he had taken the advice of his neighbor and had left his daughters nine hundred pounds each instead of the one thousand pounds they had expected. This widened the breach. At the advice of his father young John gave up Betsy for the time being and married Lady Lydia Fanning, daughter of Lord Fanning, governor of Prince Edward's Island, and brought her home to St. George's Manor. It was this young wife who died in May, 1777, at the age of fifteen, when her son, William Smith, was only a few weeks old. The bereaved widower's thoughts turned to Betsy for consolation, but she would still have none of him, and so he married one Mary Platt. Meantime, Betsy Floyd became the wife of Edward Nicoll. When the wedding took place Mrs. Floyd sent word to John Smith that she was now sure that he would never get her Betsy. But she was wrong, for both Mr. Nicoll and the second Mrs. Smith having died John laid siege to the widow Nicoll and finally married her. The William Smith born in 1777 was the great-grandfather of the present owners of the manor.

From St. George's it is a roundabout drive of ten miles to Patchogue, a village famous for its oysters and dear to the sentimental pilgrim as the last home and burial-place of Seba Smith, — a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy, the friend and welcome comrade of Lincoln, and, under the nom de plume of Major Jack Downing, the best-known humorist of his time. Smith spent the closing years of his life in Patchogue, and died there in 1868 at the age of seventy-six. His grave lies in an abandoned burial-ground near the edge of a wood at the back of the village. The storm-worn marble slab above it tells the passer-by that he was the author of “Way Down East” and many other works, and that “He was well beloved,” but no stone marks the grave beside his own, where eight years ago the body of his wife, the once famous and beloved Eliza Oakes Smith, was laid to rest. Yet in the old Knickerbocker literary period of New York no woman was counted so brilliant or more beautiful. She was the central figure of coteries that had for their spirits such men as Bryant, Willis, Poe, Ripley, Irving, and Longfellow, while women like Mrs. Sigourney, Anna Estelle Lewis (Stella), Anna Cora Mowatt, and the Carey sisters regarded Eliza Oakes Smith as their most talented confrère. She was the soul and life of every great literary gathering in those times, and the brilliant salon of Madame Vincenza Botta had not a more charming habitué. She was the first woman in this country to appear as a public lecturer, and among the first to speak from a pulpit. In 1841 her fame was at its zenith, and her book of “The Sinless Child” carried her name to other lands. But men pass away and tastes pass with them, and long before her husband's death she had disappeared from public view. After that she lived for a time in a small and secluded cottage at Patchogue. Then she moved to North Carolina, and her death in 1892 was notable chiefly because it reminded a busy and careless world that such a woman as Eliza Oakes Smith had ever lived.

And so, pondering over the fickle thing called fame, we left Patchogue behind us and made our way by rail to Babylon and thence by wheel through the Half-Way Hollow Hills and Huntingdon town to Huntingdon Harbor, on the north side of the island, during the opening years of the Revolution the rendezvous and base of operations of the British general Tryon, whose troops burned and looted the towns along the Connecticut shore, and memorable also as the scene, in September, 1776, of the betrayal and capture of Captain Nathan Hale. The story of that brave and hapless young patriot is a familiar one, but never lacks willing listeners. It was after the disastrous battle of Long Island that Hale, cognizant of Washington's sore need of information as to the strength and probable plans of the enemy, offered in order to obtain the same to enter the British lines in disguise. What instructions, advice, cautions, Hale received from his chief there are no records to tell us. We only know that he suddenly disappeared from the patriot camp, passed up the Connecticut shore, changed his uniform to civilian garb, crossed to Huntingdon Harbor, and then made his way to the enemy at Brooklyn and New York, — never to return. He had finished his work and was preparing to cross again to the Connecticut shore when he was seized and held by the crew of a yawl which he had mistaken for the boat which was to have been sent to take him away. Without delay he was delivered to the British authorities at New York, by whom, having frankly declared his rank and the object of his visit to the enemy's camp, he was condemned as a spy and shot, saying as he faced the muskets of his executioners, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Seven miles to the east of Huntingdon Harbor, beside a sharp bend in the Sound, nestles Oyster Bay, flanked by orchards and threaded with shady lanes, another island nook which saw stirring days during the Revolution, days of confusion, of bustle, and shrewd blows, the memory of which contrasts sharply with its sleepy, uneventful present. The old Townsend homestead, which dates from 1740, and stands amid a thick growth of trees in the centre of the village, was during the British occupation of the island the head-quarters of Colonel Simcoe and his band of Queen's Rangers, who danced and flirted with the handsome daughters of its master and carved their names and those of the girls on the windowpanes of the old house. These panes of glass are among the relics cherished by the present occupants of the Townsend homestead, built in such enduring fashion that it promises to outlive another century, and on the hill to the west of the village one can still trace the fortifications thrown up and then abandoned by the long-gone British troopers. The harbor from which Oyster Bay borrows its name was the scene of a stirring naval fight in November, 1779, between two American privateers and a large, well-armed British brig, in which the foreigner was badly worsted.

A little way to the south of Oyster Bay and out of sight of the sea is Jericho, a slow-going hamlet of only a few hundred souls, where one finds one's self amid the lifelong surroundings of sturdy Elias Hicks, in many ways the most remarkable man American Quakerism has yet produced and the leader in the most serious schism that has marked its history. Hicks was born and reared in the town of Hempstead, but in 1771, when he was twenty-three years old, he took to wife a Quaker maiden of Jericho, which became and remained his home until his death in 1830, at the ripe age of eighty-two. His youth, he tells us in his journals, was one of indifference to the faith in which he was born, but the coming of his twentieth year witnessed a great change in his thoughts and mode of life, and seven years later he entered the Quaker ministry, laboring therein with untiring diligence for more than half a century. It is recorded of him that he travelled above ten thousand miles on foot, visiting in this way Canada and almost every State in the Union and preaching in the open air more than one thousand times. A poor man all his days, he asked nor would accept no compensation for his services, and when not preaching labored on his farm in the outskirts of Jericho. The doctrines which Hicks cherished and which he expounded with so much vigor and power may have slight significance for the men and women of another generation, but the fact lives that this lion-hearted old man early opposed negro slavery, fought it in the Society, wrote and preached against it, and was chiefly instrumental in securing the passage of the act that on July 4, 1827, gave freedom to every slave within the limits of the State of New York. Therein he wrote for himself a nobler epitaph than could have been graven by the hand of man.

From Jericho, with its memories of Hicks, it is scant eight miles to Roslyn, long the home of William Cullen Bryant, and for that reason destined in future years to become dear to every worshipper at the shrine of genius and pure renown. It has a history running well back into the last century, but was a village of only a few hundred souls when Bryant first visited it in 1843, and making it his place of summer abiding, soon grew to regard it as the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Love of nature was his absorbing passion, and to this taste Roslyn ministered with gentle prodigality, furnishing the inspiration for many of his sweetest poems. Though he yearly made his pilgrimage back to his New England home at Cummington, in the Hampshire Hills, Roslyn grew to be the place he loved best in all the world, and in his latter years he hurried to it early in the spring and lingered there until late in the fall.

The Quaker homestead to which Bryant gave the name of Cedarmere and in which he dwelt for thirty-five years, is a roomy, rambling structure, in the colonial style, with broad piazzas, quaint extensions, and heavy oaken timbers as stanch and perfect as when they were put in place a hundred and ten years ago. It stands on a bench in the hillside, flanked on the one hand by a lake and brook and on the other by a garden teeming with flower-beds and fruit. Before and below it the glimmering harbor spreads its ever-changing, charming panorama. Inside Cedarmere are wide, open grates, huge-throated chimneys, and antique balustrades, while a broad hallway runs the entire length of the house, which has altered little since Bryant knew and loved it. Reverent hands keep it from neglect, and each day finds some visitor knocking at the old-fashioned door for a ramble over the poet's home. His grave is in the village cemetery, whose burial-stones whiten the slope of a neighboring hill. The lot is large and hemmed in by trees, with a plain granite shaft in the centre. On one side of the shaft is recorded the death of Fanny Bryant, the poet's wife, who was “the beloved disciple of Christ, exemplary in every relation of life, affectionate, sympathetic, sincere, and ever occupied with the welfare of others.” On the other side there is simply the poet's name and birthplace, and the time of his birth and death. No epitaph is given and none is needed.

Cedarmere, Home of William Cullen Bryant.

Our journey through and around Long Island ended, as we had planned that it should, at Flushing, to-day a town of handsome modern homes, but haunted by the spirit of its Dutch and Puritan founders and of the Huguenots and Quakers who followed after them. It was in 1672 that that immortal zealot, George Fox, came to Flushing, sent by Penn, who saw among the Long Islanders, many of them, for conscience' sake self-exiled from England, a promising field for the simple faith of the Friends. John Bowne, a well-to-do tradesman, was his first convert. Fox made Bowne's house his home during his stay in Flushing, and in one corner of it is still shown the lounge on which he rested after his impassioned outpourings in the open air. Later Bowne's indiscreet hospitality led to his banishment to Holland, but he turned his punishment to good effect by pleading the cause of the Quakers and returning with an order for the tolerance of the persecuted people.

The house, whose doors Bowne opened to the apostle of his new-found creed, still stands upon the site its builder selected for it in 1661, and though built of wood has remained unaltered to the present day. Nor through all the changes of more than two hundred years has it ever left the possession of its first owner's family, being now the property of a lineal descendant of John Bowne. After serving as a meeting-place for the Friends for more than a generation, Bowne's house was relinquished for the occupancy of a more substantial building erected in 1696, now the oldest Quaker meeting-house in the State, and perhaps in the country. This structure was the home of the brethren for upward of a century and is yet standing practically unchanged on its original site near the main street of Flushing. When Fox came to the village a number of Huguenot families had been settled there for several years. Few, if any, of their descendants remain, as the emigres soon returned to the Old World, leaving behind them, however, a graceful reminder of their stay in an industry which has since been distinctive of the town, for to them is due the credit of establishing the first nurseries in America and the planting of the trees which form the chief beauty of the village streets.

Nor is Flushing wanting in memorials of the Revolutionary era. The house occupied by Washington during the patriot operations on Long Island has since been demolished, but the Garretson House, which was built, tradition has it, in 1642, and is still standing in Main Street, was used during the Hessian occupation as a hospital for soldiers, while old St. George's Church across the way served as the stable for the horses of the detachment quartered in the neighborhood. Thus does the past touch elbow with the present in shady, leafy, and delightful Flushing.