ite of old Fort Amsterdam,
carrying us back to Knickerbocker memories of Peter Stuyvesant and
Wowter Van Twiller. The view from the after-deck, before the steamer
leaves the pier, gives scope for the imagination to re-picture the
far-away primitive and heroic days of early New York.

=Desbrosses Street Pier.=--On leaving the lower landing a charming
view is obtained of New York Harbor, the Narrows, Staten Island, the
Bartholdi Statue of Liberty, and, in clear weather, far away to the
South, the Highlands of Nevisink, the first land to greet the eye
of the ocean voyager. As the steamer swings out into the stream the
tourist is at once face to face with a rapidly changing panorama.
Steamers arriving, with happy faces on their decks, from southern
ports or distant lands; others with waving handkerchiefs bidding
good-bye to friends on crowded docks; swift-shuttled ferry-boats, with
hurrying passengers, supplying their homespun woof to the great warp
of foreign or coastwise commerce; noisy tug-boats, sombre as dray
horses, drawing long lines of canal boats, or proud in the convoy of
some Atlantic greyhound that has not yet slipped its leash; dignified
"Men of War" at anchor, flying the flags of many nations, happy
excursion boats _en route_ to sea-side resorts, scows, picturesque
in their very clumsiness and uncouthness--all unite in a living
kaleidescope of beauty.

* * *

Rise, stately symbol! Holding forth
Thy light and hope to all who sit
In chains and darkness! Belt the earth
With watch-fires from thy torch uplit!

_John Greenleaf Whittier._

* * *

Across the river on the Jersey Shore are seen extensive docks of great
railways, with elevators and stations that seem like "knotted ends"
of vast railway lines, lest they might forsooth, untwist and become
irrecoverably tangled in approaching the Metropolis. Prominent among
these are the _Pennsylvania Railroad_ for the South and West; the
_Erie Railway_, the _Delaware, Lackawanna and Western_, and to the
North above Hoboken the _West Shore_, serving also as starting point
for the _New York, Ontario and Western_. Again the eye returns to
the crowded wharves and warehouses of New York, reaching from Castle
Garden beyond 30th Street, with forest-like masts and funnels of ocean
steamships, and then to prominent buildings mounting higher and higher
year by year along the city horizon, marking the course of Broadway
from the Battery, literall