Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

IN CIVIL WAR TIME

49

mounts. The Academy of Music burning, to leave ruins
like the theatre at Pompeii. Coney Island with the
lonely beaeh and the long walk, cross-planked, to the
solitary refectory at Norton's Point. Peter Goelet's cow,
surrounded by peacocks, on the front lawn of the mansion
at Broadway and Nineteenth. Suburban omnibuses for
a country ride, starting once every hour or two from in
front of the apothecary-shop at Sixth Avenue and Thirtyfourth, running up the Bloomingdale Road that has become the Great White Way, between hedgerows and
vegetable farms and occasional madhouses, quite to
High Bridge, where there are foxes and raccoons in cages.
Until after the Civil War a wooden farmhouse still stood
on the route to Albany, as far down-town as Twentyninth Street.
It is a medley, but perhaps it helps to reconstruct that
other New York.
I was taken in 1861 to Haughwort's great china and
glass store at Broome Street, with the big clock on its
iron front, to witness, in the workshops on the top floor,
processes sure to interest a boy. Several of the artists,
skilfully handling their fine camel's-hair brushes, were
decorating plates with black eagles and flags. Others were
pressing goblets and wine-glasses against whirring little
emery-wheels, cutting other eagles, all to go into President Lincoln's new banquet service for the White House.
"Dey say he iss a goot man," a friendly old German
decorator remarked, looking up for a moment from his
black eagle, by and by to be fired to gold.
I should not have remembered it, but my father did
and spoke of it to me when we went to see the President's
black-draped car in the Hudson River Railroad's yard

near West Thirty-third Street, where the funeral train
halted on its way to Illinois.
For learning the Shorter Catechism by heart, so that I
could recite without a mistake the answers to the ques