Seventeenth streets. The first edifice was an open shed supported on wooden posts, and the slope from it down to Shockoe Creek was a green pasture, and considered a common, much used by laundresses whereon to dry the clothes which they washed in the stream. A spring of cool water arose in the common on the south side of Main street, but the spot is now occupied by a building where fountains of fire-water are substituted for the natural and pure element, and, I fear, it may be added, that the combined elements attract more thirsty bodies than the simple one did of yore, although the thirst is more apt to be increased than allayed by the fiery substitute.*

The creek was crossed by foot passengers on a narrow bridge, raised a few feet above the surface of the water, but horses cooled their feet by fording it. When freshets occurred, the planks were removed from the bridge and a ferry-boat was substituted, which conveyed vehicles, as well as man and horse, across the wide and sometimes deep stream.

At the mouth of the creek, where the gas holders now rise and fall, was a wharf, built around a broad, flat rock (which has been blasted to accommodate the gas), and this place was called the Rock Landing, where oyster boats and small craft resorted.

* This fountain has found a different outlet, 1860.

Along the then elevated bank of the river, from about the rear of the present Union Hotel, a grassy walk, shaded by elm and other trees, extended for a considerable distance, down to where Foster's rope-walk afterwards stood, and this was the fashionable promenade. Of late years, the clay which nourished those trees has been converted into bricks, the surface lowered many feet, and a large portion of it covered with buildings. Below this bank was a small branch of the river, separated from the main stream by a narrow strip of land, an island, on which grew a few large sycamore trees, about the site of the present dock. I remember a vessel, grounded probably in a freshet, in this narrow stream, and converted into a place of refreshment, which was reached by a platform from the shore, and resorted to by promenaders. Its position was peculiarly favorable for the sale of oysters to those who sought recreation there.

On

The eastern end of this shaded walk terminated in a high and steep cliff, overhanging the river, which washed its base at high water, but at low tide admitted of a narrow walk on the sands. the occasion of a severe ice freshet once, a great deposit of drift-wood, soil and sand formed a small island some hundred feet from this cliff. A German, named Widewilt, whose trumpet called the troops to horse, procured a land warrant and

located it on this new-found land, and, to secure. it against becoming a floating island, he drove stakes all round his slippery domain, and wattled them, so that future freshets might add further deposits; and thus Widewilt's Island became a possession of some value as a fishery and a sand mart. The island remained above water longer than its founder did above ground; but a similar accident to that which formed the island recurred, and destroyed the work of its predecessor. An ice freshet consolidated the river, and so obstructed the current that the ice borne over the Falls continued to accumulate in height until it rose to the level of Mayo's Bridge. An unfrozen current flowed underneath, but was not visible for many miles. The immense mass of ice slowly disappeared, and with it disappeared Widewilt's Island.

A similar loss of territory happened to Great Britain some years before. A volcanic island rose in the Atlantic off St. Michael's, one of the Azores, in 1811, and when it became cool enough not to scorch shoe leather, the captain of the British frigate Sabrina, then cruising on that station, landed on it, and coolly took possession in the name of his sovereign, and gave to it the name of his ship. It was my fortune, or misfortune, during the war in 1814, soon after passing the site of this new British territory, to be captured by one of his Britannic Majesty's ships. I was on

board an American vessel commanded by a Scotchman, and was captured by a British vessel commanded by a Yankee, and to complete the strange antithesis, a Yankee prize-master was placed over my Scotch captain. The Yankee was a well disposed—I should rather say a good-natured man— for his disposition to fight against his country was not well, but he had been a carpenter in the British service "long before the fight begun." I inquired of him about the island, and was told he could show me what remained of it. Thereupon, opening his sea-chest, he handed me a lump of lava, and said he was present at the birth of the island, and acted as one of its godfathers. That he took this memento of his bantling, who did not survive, or rather sur-wave, but about eighteen months; and he bestowed on me one-half of the British dominion he had rescued from the other dominion which is claimed in that boastful song, "Britannia rules the waves."

An ephemeral island has risen and subsided several times near the same spot. Should “Sabrina," or one of her ascendants, venture again to raise her head above water, she will probably be claimed by Great Britain as a deserter; nor is such a claim likely to be disputed, except in the lower regions, whence these islands seem to emigrate.

Widewilt and his successors in various projects, forced the river from its natural bed, and such has

been the encroachment of Richmond on its passive opposite neighbor, that a large rock, formerly on the southern margin of the river, to which the Manchester anglers could step, with the aid of a fence-rail, now shows its rugged head in mid-channel. The present margin of the river is not its natural one along any portion of the entire length of the city; but the latter may be traced along the inner banks of Haxall's canal, of that portion of the James River Canal which extends from Haxall's to the Dock, and of the north side of the Dock throughout its whole length. Many acres of land have been made by encroachments on the water, embracing a new territory below Haxall's mills, the site of the Danville Railroad Depot, that of the new tobacco warehouse of Messrs. Mayo, and the long extent of embankment betwixt the dock and the river on which a street is made and a number of buildings erected. In old times the river would probably have attempted to repel this encroachment, but it does not rise in its wrath now as formerly. There is no knowing what it may yet do when highly excited.

The Rock Landing has had a singular succession of occupants. When vessels of some size could no longer float there, and when even the oyster boats had to abandon it in favor of a wharf which was extended to deeper water, a shot-tower was erected on it. Although founded on a rock, it had not