f them with considerable
architectural effect, giving a trim and bandbox look to the river-side.

The transformation is even more marked on the adjacent shores. As I
remember Jersey City and Hoboken in my boyhood, they were only small
clusters of buildings, with a ferry-house at the water's edge. Now they
have crept along from the Palisades to the Kill van Kull, overflowed the
Bergen Hills, reared giant structures which rival New York's in
monstrosity, and extended their railroad-wharves and steamship-piers
over the Arcadian haunts of the Elysian Fields and the primitive meadows
of Communipaw and Paulus Hook. And on the East River Brooklyn, joined to
New York by its Siamese ligament of the Bridge, seems the bigger twin of
the two. The contrast at night is still more striking. The river and the
town are brilliant with electric lights, where formerly twinkling lamps
or gas-lights made darkness visible. These have the effect of stars of
the first magnitude; and the great Bridge, seen on a dark night from
the South Ferry, with its lights at regular intervals, suggests that
Orion must have slipped his belt.

Crossing the ferry by night was always a favorite experience with me. In
sultry weather one can nearly always get a whiff of freshened air,
perhaps from the sea; and the quiet is not less reviving to the heated
brain. Nowhere does the night seem more "stilly," or the sense of
seclusion more profound, than in the middle of the broad bay on a
midsummer night before or after the theatre-goers have crossed. The
cities, veiled in moonlight or dim in the star-light, seem to be
breathing peacefully in giant slumber. The prosaic features of the scene
are hidden, the ragged outlines softened, and the smoke and din
indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like
masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the
rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by
day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living
creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight.
The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,--the
former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps a galaxy
of many-colored lights. On a dark night it has the effect of a discharge
of Roman candles arrested in mid-career. The other ferry-boats have a
comical appearance as they whirl and whiz past us. If in the daytime
they are deplorably