He him the turbid and hazy river, to which no limit could be discovered, lay moaning, whilst on the surface, flakes of phosphoric light ever and anon gleamed and again vanished. On the other, was a flat and dreary expanse of what seemed a heath, unbroken by any object until it was terminated by a dark rocky wall, reaching, as he thought, from earth to heaven. No human being was to be seen, and Vince determined to quit the demon-manned bark when he might. jumped unharmed to the shore, and ran forward. A groan or grunt from behind arrested his progress, and casting his eyes backwards, he saw, at a little distance, the two infernal oarsmen. Each was sitting on a stone as big as a stoop, with his back towards Vince; whilst projecting a foot from each of their mouths was a bowl, burning red-hot with live coals, as of juniper or bright naphtha, which yields light to the kingdom of Pluto. The strong red glare thence emitted, threw its lurid reflection over the bronzed swarthy sidefaces of the fiendish watermen, and on their saucer-sized eyes, and upon great columnar *Stoop, in the sense here used, is a native New-York word. It means the steps and railing and seats (if any,) of the porch of a house, and is a good word enough, because there is no better. He volumes of dense vapour, ascending and commingling in interminable rings of red-tinged smoke. Vince averted his eyes and ran. ran on until he was up to his middle in mud. How he got out I know not; but he extricated himself by that instinct which is surer than reason, and on he ran again, perhaps an hundred yards. Now the solid earth seemed to bend under his feet like a sheet of pasteboard. The ground shook and trembled, and still he ran on and on, until he ran against a rock at the base of the hills before mentioned. Well it was for him that his nose was neither a Roman nose nor a Grecian, but a pug nose, else would he have broken it. His eyes saw all sorts of manycoloured rainbow lights, and the wind swept in gusts round his ears with tones of strange import. He began to scramble up the precipice. I despise asterisks and fragments from the bottom of my heart; but I respect truth too much to supply from fancy the chasms of authentic tradition. How Vince got up the hill I cannot say. All that I know is, that a pallid and exanimate slender man was picked up on Bergen Hill next morning, by Hans Van Riper and his brother Yop, who took him to their house near Paulus Hook, whence he was ferried to the city. It was Vince. He got home about noon next day, and began to tell a confused and mysterious story, which nobody could make any thing of. As his senses returned, it become more coherent, though not less fantastical. He said that the devil preached over in Jersey, and had a pulpit at Weehawk; that service was held there every Friday night, and that the devil talked "handsomer" than the recorder or the rector of Trinity -that Mr. Hoax had made all his money by going to hear him, and that Satan and Lucifer rowed him over to the sermon every Friday. The tailor's shop was soon run down with a crowd of inquisitive people. He still persisted in the same story, though with variations always increasing the marvel. Still the crowd augmented, and as it grew, so did the cockney's story. At last a regular mob was collected about his door, and before old Trinity Church. Dr. Magraw came also among them, and wanted to know what brought so many fools together. But the Doctor is a person of no mean note in my story, which I must therefore suspend, to give some account of him. Dr. M'GRATH, as he spelt his name, or Dr. MAGRAW, as others spelt it and called him, had now practised physic in New-York about fifteen years. Who, or what he was, besides being Dr. Magraw, no one knew. Some thought him a Jesuit in disguise-others a French spy-and others again, one that had dealings with the prince of darkness. A more charitable conjecture was, that he belonged to one of those unfortunate Scotch families who had taken the wrong side in 1745. His name was Scotch, but he talked good, though coarse English, neither Scotch, nor Cockney, nor provincial. To perplex the curious yet more, he talked Dutch, not only to the satisfaction of the colonists, but also of their Leyden-bred pastors. He spoke French also, fluently and well; and was quite at home in various patois-Norman, Gascon, Limousin, and what not. When he talked with the Lutheran minister, it was in pure Saxon High German; yet he chatted with the humbler members of the flock in their native Hessian or Bavarian jawbreaking dialects. So that, for aught that could be inferred from his tongue, he might be German, or Dutch, or French, as well as Scotch. thing was certain: he was a thoroughly bred physician and surgeon, familiar with all the science of his day; had attended Boerhaave's lectures at Leyden, and walked the hospitals of Paris. In person, he was short, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, vigorous, sturdy, and stirring, with a lively, keen gray eye, sandy hair, and one of those hard-favoured visages which give One no note of age. Whether he was thirty or fifty on his arrival at New-York, was hard to telland it was equally so, forty years after. His first notoriety arose from his refusing to keep accounts and send in bills, like the other city doctors, and resolutely insisting on his guinea fees. Of these he got but few; until he was called in, by sheer accident, to a consultation on a desperate case, in the family of Chief Justice Delancey, with the two most fashionable physicians of that day. One of these was a pretty, soft-spoken, mild, bowing, simpering, complimenting, news-retailing, neatly-dressed gentleman, mighty courteous to nurses and old ladies: the other was a solemn, pompous personage, who quoted Latin, called himself a Fellow of the London College of Physicians, and took snuff out of a large gold box. Magraw, at his first interview, threw the whole family into confusion, by pronouncing one an old woman and the other a quack, and refusing to see the patient again, unless they were both discharged. The Chief Justice, who, though unskilled in medicine, had great skill in men, saw at once (what had never occurred to him before) that Magraw was right, and gave him the command of the sick room. In a month the lady was well, and the doctor's reputation established. After this, business flowed in upon him; and such |