tized by the name of Priscilla Pitcairn Quintal: "So named," says Mr. Nobbs, "as she will in all probability be the last born of this community on the island." Two days after the whole community embarked on a vessel provided by the British government, and after a stormy voyage of five weeks reached their new home.

66

that name since), which was the first fire I had ever seen in a dwelling-house, and an excellent addition to my previous ideas of domestic comfort." Mr. Patteson, the chaplain to the Bishop of Melanesia, gives a vivid description of the Pitcairners as they appeared a month after their arrival at Norfolk Island:

"I landed, and met Mr. Nobbs and family, and plenty of men and women-thirty families-sixty married people, and one hundred and thirty-four children and young men and women. I had tea at Mr. Nobbs's house, and afterward asked to hear some of the young people sing, which they did beautifully-in parts. About twenty-four came to the house, and sang, for two hours and a half, psalms, hymns, and ended with

A letter written by Mrs. Nobbs soon after their arrival gives a quaint insight into the life which these people had led. "Every thing," she writes, "was so strange! The immense houses, the herds of cattle grazing, and, in the distance, the gigantic Norfolk pines, filled us for the moment with amazement. I was conduct-God Save the Queen,' admirably sung. The simple, ed to the Government-house, and seated by a good fire in the drawing-room (I have learned

modest, and manly behavior-the gentle looks of all, men and women-every thing about them, quite confirms all that I had read. The men are darker than the

have no medicine on the island. Meat is scarce, and so are fish. We have some sheep and goats, but no cattle, and the hogs are diseased. There has been a failure of the yam crops, so that our principal food is sweet-potatoes and plantains. Oranges are plentiful, and bananas and pine-apples, so that we make out pretty well in the eating line. Most of the people would rather be on Norfolk Island than here."

ally stopped at the island, had proposed for her in marriage; and her father writes:

"He will probably return in a few months, when, I suppose, if nothing turns up to his disadvantage, the wedding will take place. Now you will inquire, Why does not the silly girl marry one of her own people?' Well, the reasons are not very reconcilable, and may be answered very briefly. In the first place, there are but two men near Jane's age unmarried. One of these is of deficient intellect, and the other is of so taciturn a disposition that he would hardly speak for months if not spoken to; in fact, no girl ever expects Robert Buffett to make her an offer. Jane is now twentythree years of age, and any of the lads four or five years younger than herself would be rejected with contempt. I suppose if she don't marry an Englishman or an American-and she has had offers from both-she will remain single. The matter is a source of anxiety both to my good wife and myself. However, I will use all prudence, with a prayerful attention to my duty as a parent, and then will leave the result to Him who has graciously said, 'I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring.'"

We return to the emigrants on Norfolk Island. Mr. Nobbs took, on the whole, a cheerful view of the situation. "The land," he wrote, in 1859, "is a goodly land, and needs nothing but a contented mind and a grateful heart to render it productive and pleasant." His contentment was perhaps a little increased by a government grant of £50 a year in addition to the like sum given him by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Besides the cultivation of the soil, the people took to whaling, with very fair success. In this same letter we get a bit of domestic history. Jane Nobbs had grown up. Her photograph taken at this time Two years later we get at the dénouement shows her to be decidedly pretty. The com- of Jane Nobbs's love-life. In a letter to Admander of a Sydney whaler, who had occasion-miral Moresby she says, incidentally: "As to

the affair of my getting married, I leave it en- | the next in rank, who is myself, until the arrival tirely to the will of the all-wise Providence. If of another son whom I am daily expecting from it should be His will that we should get mar- Sydney; and two pupil - teachers at £12 and ried, I trust He will bless us; but, if otherwise, £6 respectively. The few surplus pounds are then His will be done' also; but, I assure you, expended in paper, ink, etc. My threescore I love him sincerely.' A year later we find, in years and ten are beginning to weigh heavily a letter from her father: "Jane was married a upon me, my hearing being especially impairfew months since to her cousin, John Quintal." ed." There were living two children of the So that the "him" was neither the young sail- mutineers of the Bounty; one, Arthur Quintal, or, nor any Englishman or American, nor the seventy-six years of age, being "the oldest man man deficient of intellect, nor taciturn Robert on the island, with something of the spirit of Buffett, but one of those fellows four or five the old Covenanters." The next year, 1869, years her junior, whose offers it was presumed was a sad one for the community, thirty of its would have been "rejected with contempt." members having died. In the twelve years since the landing on Norfolk Island, there had been two hundred and four births and seventytwo deaths, of which almost half were in this one year. Leaving this death-year out of view, there is probably no community on the globe where the births show such a preponderance over the deaths.

The question of getting husbands grew to be rather a serious matter. The British governor at Sidney was asked to "look out for husbands for several young damsels who were growing up without a proper supply of the article," but, says he, "I found it beyond my power to meet the demand. I could not get a single eligible offer. No applicant that I could approve presented himself. Several of a different stamp applied for leave to proceed to the island, but in no case did I accede to the application." But in course of time men who to the girls themselves seemed "eligible" did present themselves, and, not greatly to the liking of Admiral Moresby and Mr. Nobbs, got themselves

wives from the fair islanders.

We close our sketch of the Pitcairn Islanders with an extract from a letter of Mr. Nobbs to Lady Belcher, written on the 10th of January, 1870:

"From our coral-fenced austrine hacienda of twenty miles circumference, glowing beneath a midsummer tion of grace, mercy, and peace. We have all the day and nearly vertical sun, accept our New-Year's salutalong been engaged in laying the foundations of our new church (All-Saints'), and humbly trust we shall be permitted to finish it by the middle of this year. It is to In consequence of increasing deafness (one of the three warnings) I am constrained to relinquish my superintendence of Sunday and day schools. The latter I used to visit every Friday to catechise the children; but I can do so no longer. I am most grateful that for forty-one years (since 1828) I have been enabled to do my duty in that state of life in which I humbly trust it was His good pleasure to place me; and now, providentially, there is other help at hand, that my people will not be neglected, or sustain much loss whenever my number is made. And now, my dear Lady, I close by bidding you God-speed, and that the descendants of the Mutineers of the Bounty may have grateful cause to felicitate themselves on your exposition of their fathers' derelictions and provocations. "Yours, in verity,

In 1868 Mr. Nobbs writes: "We are going on in our usual quiet way, but not greatly improving our condition in worldly matters; hav-be of wood, one hundred feet long and forty feet wide. ing at all times a good supply of food, but not of other domestic requirements, by reason that ships rarely visit us, and the island produce is not demanded in the colonies of New Zealand and Australia. We at this moment number exactly three hundred persons, and, somewhat singular, there are one hundred and fifty of either sex. The births last year were eighteen, deaths four, from whooping-cough. There are ninety children being educated, and the parents pay £1 a year for each child, which is divided among the teachers in this manner: £40 for the principal, who is a son of mine; £25 for

"GEORGE H. NOBBS."

THE

BOWERY, SATURDAY NIGHT.

INFANT GERMANY.

HE more noticeable features of the growth of New York city, from its grotesque and singular germ in the little Dutch village on the southern end of Manhattan Island, have been to a certain extent forced upon it by topographical peculiarities, both of land and water; but social and national groupings have also exercised an important agency. Like has sought and clung to its like, and as strenuously shunned and avoided its unlike or its opposite, until now, speaking within limits, different classes and nationalities have assumed and occupied their different "quarters" almost as distinctively as if assigned to them by despotic edicts of the Middle Ages. Neither has the city's growth been at all subservient to the prophecies or plans of those who have sought to direct or control it. Nothing has gone as it was meant to go, nor is any thing where, according to map and calculation, it should be. The men who fondly looked upon Chatham Square as the future centre of trade are not more hopelessly "out" than those who pinned their faith to Pearl Street, or settled themselves for life within sight of the City Hall clock.

erwise, always dirty, crowded, and busy. This is Chatham Street, the main connection between the technically "down-town" districts of New York and the swarming "east side." It terminates in a very irregular open space on what was once a pretty steep hill-side, known as Chatham Square, being about as far as possible from that shape, or, indeed, from any whatsoever. Here, also, terminate or begin, as you please, a number of other streets. New Bowery, an attempt at a short cut down to the "Swamp" and the leather-men; Oliver, East Broadway, and Catherine, running to the banks of the East River; Division, stretching away toward Corlear's Hook; Worth, newly opened through from Broadway and the west side, by way of letting in the daylight of a broad business thoroughfare upon the darkness of the intervening "Five Points," and thereby destroying all the sombre and filthy romance of that once famous locality. Mott Street, running nearly parallel with the Bowery, is but a tenement-house lane, and Doyer but a cul de sac, while all the others are legitimate and more or less important feeders of the Bowery-the great artery of the eastern side of Manhattan Island and the Broadway of Germantown.

Let no unlettered rustic win derision to himself by calling this great thoroughfare Bowery Street, for it is "The Bowery," and nothing more. In the good old days when the memory of Hendrick Hudson and due reverence for "their High Mightinesses" of Amsterdam had not yet departed from Man-a-hatta, stouthearted and hard-headed old Governor Peter Stuyvesant had his Bouwerie, or country seat, out this way, and the highway thereto, out of proper respect, derived its imperishable name therefrom.

In some of the earlier maps, to be sure, prepared by presumptuous Yankees or usurping Englishmen, the Governor's drive is degraded to "the high-road to Boston," as if New Yorkers cared what settlements bordered on their If, however, we resign the doubtful task of highway after it had departed from the incomprophesying what and where the city will be, parable island. In the maps of 1766 a better there is a good deal in the study of the city as spirit is manifested by the supersciption "Bowit is. Some one has put on record the remark ery Lane;" and in 1806 it was noted as the that "New York is not by any means an Amer-"Bowery Road," connecting near what is now ican city," but he would have been nearer the Union Square with the "Bloomingdale Road," truth if he had said, "Hardly any of these and continuing its career higher up as the New Yorks, scattered on and around Manhat-"road to Boston." On most of the later maps tan Island, are distinctively American." Some there is no attempt to add useless appendages of them have developed curiously composite to the simple and sufficient cognomen. characters of their own-constantly changing of course-not to be mated elsewhere in the world; and one of them, quite a large "city within a city," is sufficiently German in its characteristics to merit an especial description. Turning off to the right, or easterly, from the City Hall, is a street of varying width, irregular direction, and no great length, destitute of all pretensions to beauty, architectural or oth

In those ancient and excellent days of pastoral simplicity, on the left, as you went north from Chatham Square, lay the estates of the De Lanceys, and above them the broad lands of Dyckman and Brevoort, while on the right the old records give us the historic names of Rutgers, Bayard, Minthorne, Van Cortlandt, and others; and beyond and exceeding these were the Bouwerie and other possessions of