Excerpt from Flamsted Quarries

A few years ago, at the very tip of that narrow rocky strip of land that has been well named "the Tongue that laps the Commerce of the World, " the million-teeming Island of Manhattan, there was daily presented a scene in the life-drama of our land that held in itself, as in solution, a great national ideal. The old heroic "Epic of the Nations" was still visible to the naked eye, and masquerading here among us of the then nineteenth century in the guise of the arrival of the immigrant ship.

The scenic setting is in this instance incomparably fine. As we lean on the coping of the sea wall at the end of the green-swarded Battery, in the flush of a May sunset that, on the right, throws the Highlands of the Navesink into dark purple relief and lights the waters of Harbor, River, and Sound into a softly swelling roseate flood, we may fix our eyes on the approach to The Narrows and watch the incoming shipping of the world: the fruit-laden steamer from the Bermudas, the black East Indiaman heavy with teakwood and spices, the lumberman's barge awash behind the tow, the old three-masted schooner, low in the water, her decks loaded with granite from the far-away quarries of Maine.

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