onsciously they group themselves in picturesque attitudes, which no
artistic eye could improve upon! Their staves, their dangling bundles of
coarse canvas or of tied-up handkerchiefs of various colors, their
quaint and often grotesque attire, their silent posture and vigilant
eyes, their sheep-like dependence on their guides, combined with a
watch-dog solicitude for their miserable traps, their household
groupings and varied ages, from the baby born on shipboard to the old
grandfather come to lay his rheumatic bones in the soil of a strange
land,--I have stood and watched it all many and many a time, ere I
hurried on to my day's business or to my happy home; and the work has
seemed more significant, and the home more sweet, for that sight. Surely
one need cut only a little way into life here in order to touch its
profoundest mysteries and its most far-reaching suggestions.

One who has known New York for a generation or two cannot fail to be
struck with its changed appearance as seen from the ferry-boat. It used
to lie as low and flat as a whale's back, with perhaps a harpoon
sticking out here and there,--to wit, a steeple. The steam elevator has
proved quite an Aladdin's Lamp in its magical feats of architecture, by
developing a vertical in place of a lateral growth of buildings. The
best building-lots are now in the air, and to be had without
ground-rent. Troy had to raise its successive Iliums, Ilioses, and
Trojas, at intervals of ages, and tear or burn each one down before
erecting the next. But we propose to save the Schliemanns of the future
a world of trouble by building our various New Yorks simultaneously, one
on top of the other. Accordingly, the city is becoming crowded with
towering and clumsy structures, especially on the elevated ridge which
runs along Broadway from the City Hall to the Battery, giving it the
appearance of an uncouth acropolis. All over the town manufactories and
public buildings of colossal size stand, like megatheria, knee-deep in a
jungle of houses. The campaniles of modern industry rise slim and tall
into the air. The great buttresses and towers of the Brooklyn Bridge
loom above the house-tops. Grain-elevators, which "take the wind out of
the sails" of Noah's Ark, lie stranded on the docks. The poetic and
picturesque "forest of masts" has fallen before the march of progress
and the axe of steam almost as thoroughly as the primeval woods. The low
and open piers have been enclosed, some o