It then became clogged, and the village Vulcan, whose impartial hand
corrects at once the time-pieces and the plowshares of the neighborhood,
having knocked the machinery to pieces with a sledge, declared himself
incompetent to explain and unable to repair. My results therefore are
maimed and imperfect, but I trust they will show that I have not
exaggerated the difficulty of the process of reduction and estimation.
The fragmentary portions of the estate, then, are: the entire capital
stock of thirty-eight of the Banks of New York city (though here a wise
policy has suggested the employment of various respectable names as
those of shareholders, in order to protect these institutions from the
fury of a mob); all that portion of the metropolis lying between the
Twelfth and Twenty-second Avenues, from Canal Street to the suburb of
Poughkeepsie, comprising of necessity the water rights and quarries;
eighteen thousand millions of bullion specially deposited in the State
Bank of Mississippi, to the order of the six New England Governors,
trustees; the Pont-Noir mansion on Nultiel Street, surrounded by
twenty-five acres of land, the very heart of the best New York
residences, and variously estimated from six to eight millions of
dollars; the remote but tolerably well known villages of Boston and
Philadelphia in their entirety; and one undivided tenth of the stock of
the Valley Bank.
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