n his sleep and had taken him upon his lap when a
boy old enough to know the meaning of the words and told him to grow up
to be an honest lad. I was hurt for my young friend and indignant with
the man--too much so to reply, and as I rose to leave the room with a
mortification that I cannot remember to have felt before or since, I
paused at the door and said: 'Well, sir, in this dilemma, is there no
other church to which you can direct me from which my friend can be
buried?' He replied that 'There was a little church around the corner'
where I might get it done--to which I answered, 'Then if this be so, God
bless the Little Church Around the Corner,' and so I left the house."

A photograph from the collection of J. Clarence Davies, reproduced in
the book issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank, shows Grant's funeral
procession climbing the slope of Murray Hill, August 8, 1885, and
passing the residences of John Jacob Astor and William B. Astor, on the
sites of which is the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel of the present. The house of
John Jacob was at Thirty-third Street, and that of William B. at
Thirty-fourth Street, and there was a garden between shut off from the
Avenue by a ten-foot brick wall. The Waldorf, named after the little
town of Waldorf, Germany, the ancestral home of the family, occupies the
site of the John Jacob house, and was opened March 14, 1893. Four and a
half years later, on November 1, 1897, the Astoria came formally into
being, and the two hotels linked by the hyphen and merged under one
management. That point where Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross
is one of the great corners of New York. It is the one that made the
profoundest impression on Arnold Bennett: "The pale-pillared, square
structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a background of the lofty
red of the AEolian Building, and the great white store on the opposite
pavement." A city of amazement has been left behind. Here we are at the
threshold of still another city. It is different at every hour of the
day. But whether we see it in the sweet-scented dawn, or at high noon,
or at the shopping hour, or later, when, to use Arnold Bennett's words,
"the street lamps flicker into a steady, steely blue, and the windows of
the hotels and restaurants throw a yellow radiance, and all the
shops--especially the jewellers' shops--become enchanted treasure
houses, whose interiors recede away behind their facades into infinity,"
it is ever the essence of our Ne