The city of Gotham is an island, as we have said; and once it was a beautiful island, affording to the gaze of him who sailed along its shores, an agreeable mixture of rock and grove, topping hill and marshiy low ground, spakling here and there with the villas or country-houses of the wealthy Gothamites, mostly built of wood painted white, and adorned with long verandahs quite encircling them; or showing at some turn a humbler, but substantial abode, nooked under a mighty horse-chestnut, the headquarters of a milk-farm, with cattle (whose tinkling bells you could hear in the still evening) grazing on its wild up-hilly pasture-land.