appearance, with its alternate bands of red and white stone, resembling in many respects the medieval cathedrals of Tuscany.

The Tammany Society has its head-quarters near Union Square, in a spacious building constructed for the purpose. It happened that at the close of the Revolutionary War the officers of the American army, encamped on the Hudson river, formed an association called the Society of the Cincinnati, to be perpetuated (as it still is) among their descendants as a patrician and patriotic order. Reacting against the aristocratic tendency of this association, a large number of gentlemen formed the Benevolent Society of St. Tammany (named in honour of an ancient Indian chieftain), which has in later years become the central power and controller of the Democratic party in the State of New York, and one of the most potent political organisations in the Republic. The meetings held in the hall are often of the stormiest and most turbulent character.

The great dry-goods shops are in this vicinity, and attract thousands of ladies every fair day. The largest of these establishments is that of A. T. Stewart and Co., which is often called the greatest retail store in the world. It is an enormous building of iron and glass, five storeys high, with fifteen acres of flooring, and 2,000 employés. The sales average £12,000 a day. In the same district are several of the chief places of amusement, foremost among which is the Academy of Music, the Opera-House of New York, where many a famous prima donna has made her first appearance before admiring and uncritical American audiences. Wallack's and the Union Square Theatres are also hereabouts, and draw large and brilliant audiences. Steinway Hall and Chickering Hall, pertaining to rival firms of piano-makers, are near by, and gather many audiences of cultivated people to listen to musical entertainments and lectures.

The New York Hospital is a large new building, six storeys high, just off the square, sumptuously furnished and equipped, and accommodating 150 invalids; charging the wellto-do from £1 8s. to £10 a week, and receiving the penniless poor freely, for sweet charity's sake. The society which owns and conducts this institution was chartered by King George III. in 1771. A long way across town is Bellevue Hospital, a municipal charity with 800 beds, conducted at a cost to the city of £20,000 a year.

The vicinity of Madison Square-another bright little park opening off Broadway, six blocks above Union Square-is full of interest, and forms one of the favourite regions for promenading and sight-seeing. The Fifth Avenue Hotel, the Hoffman, the Brunswick, and other immense hotels front on the square; and several of the chief clubs of the city have their houses in the same neighbourhood. The square is adorned by a bronze statue of William H. Seward, the head of the American Cabinet during the perilous era of the Secession War; and also by a granite obelisk erected in honour of Gen. Worth, a hero of the war with Mexico. Among the fashionable clubs in this quarter are the St. Nicholas, comprising 200 gentlemen of old New York families, mostly of Dutch origin and names, devoted to social pleasures and historical researches; the Union League, with 1,500 members, the head-quarters of the Republican party in New York, and very rich and powerful; the Manhattan, with 400 members, pledged to advance the principles of the Democratic party; the Lotos, consisting of 300 gentlemen devoted to art, literature, the stage, and the learned professions; the Century, having 600 members, in Fifteenth Street, a Conservative

New York.]

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literary and æsthetic organisation; the Army and Navy, comprising 400 officers and exofficers of the regular and volunteer armies and the militia; the Knickerbocker, with 500 members, a very exclusive organisation; the New York, a fashionable club in Madison Square; the University, consisting of 500 gentlemen of liberal education; the Union, with 1,000 members, a very wealthy and aristocratic society; and the Bullion, with 145 members, devoted to the development of American mining. The Caledonian, famous for Scottish athletic games, in Thirteenth Street; the Philharmonic and Liederkranz, composed of musical people, and many other minor clubs also flourish in this region.

Near Madison Square, also, are the famous restaurants, which leave nothing to be desired, of the Trois Frères Provençaux and the Café Anglais. Delmonico's and the Hôtel Brunswick afford ménus as varied and tempting as the fondest fancy of a modern Epicurus could imagine, served in marble halls between frescoed walls, stained-glass windows, fountains, flowers, crystal candelabra, and furniture of the richest and quietest character. In adjacent streets are several large Italian and French restaurants, famous for their table d'hote dinners, with wines, where actors, artists, and journalists find congenial resorts.

A little way toward the Hudson river stand several interesting structures. Here is Booth's Theatre, one of the finest in the country, founded by Edwin Booth, the great tragedian, and for a long time devoted to the revival of Shaksperean plays. It accommodates nearly as many auditors as old Drury Lane itself. On the opposite corner is the Masonic Temple, a ponderous granite building which cost more than £200,000, and is occupied by all manner of lodge-rooms, grand lodges, and other mysterious chambers. The gentlemen bearing pompous and anachronistic titles who hold conclave here exhibit a divine method in their madness, for the order of Masons is one of the most wise and generous of the philanthropies of America, and all the revenues of this costly temple are set apart for ever as a fund for the support of the needy widows and orphans of their brethren.

The Grand Opera House is in this district, and has the largest auditorium in the city, but is so far isolated in an unfashionable street that performances of a high grade are not profitable, and the stage is usually occupied by spicily-flavoured sensational and spectacular pieces. This was one of the many enterprises of the notorious speculator and adventurer, Colonel Jim Fisk, whose main object in the venture seemed to be that he might have free admission to the green-room and behind the scenes. It was perhaps natural that he should be shot to death in a discreditable quarrel.

A little farther out is the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, richly endowed and highly flourishing, and occupying several plain stone buildings in a verdure-clad park. A majority of the churches of New York are of this ancient denomination, and a tolerant and peaceful Episcopal jurisdiction seems to allow the widest liberty among them, from the ultra-ritualistic mediaval services at St. Alban's and St. Mary the Virgin's down to the severe simplicity and Methodistic plainness of St. George's. There are several small diocesan institutions for the education of the clergy elsewhere, but the General Seminary is the chief source of supply for the entire American Episcopal Church and missions, composed of 62 bishops, 3,200 clergymen, and 324,995

communicants.

The National Academy of Design is to the United States what the Royal Academy is to Great Britain, including in its membership the foremost of American artists, and instructing several schools and classes of students in the principles and practice of art. The home of the National Academy is in Fourth Avenue, near Madison Square, and in its artistic beauty is worthy of the associations which have already begun to cluster around it. The principal material used in the construction is marble, grey and white, and the style is the Gothic of the twelfth century; so that amid these staring modern streets, above the tinkling horse-cars, and over against high-towering piles of Americanised French Renaissance, rises this dainty little Venetian palace, rather spick-and-span, to be sure, and without the hallowing stains of the sea and of the centuries, but sacred to the glories of a divine art. Whoever shall enter at its rich and elaborate portal, in the spring season and early summer, may find in the galleries hundreds of glowing canvases by the New World artists, the winter's harvest from the studios, concentrated in the annual exhibitions. The Suydam Collection is kept here permanently, and includes many brilliant and select landscapes from American easels, besides a few pictures of the modern French school, and an alleged Correggio. As in London also, there is a rival organisation, the Society of American Artists, largely made up of artists of the Munich school of painting. The American Water-Colour Society, now composed of sixty-five members, holds exhibitions every spring in the Academy galleries.

Opposite the National Academy stands the enormous Renaissance building of the Young Men's Christian Association, constructed of brown and yellow sandstone, five storeys high, and with long and ornate façades on two streets. To the stranger in New York, belonging to the Evangelical section of the Church, this institution affords, without cost and without need of introduction, something of the comforts which the great clubs give to the cosmopolitan traveller with high credentials. The parlours, library, reading-rooms, music-room, and other pleasant conveniences are free to all who care to use them, and in a manner quite fraternal, and not in the least perfunctory. A similar institution for young women, in Fifteenth Street, provides the working girls of the metropolis with free readingrooms, libraries, classes in sundry branches of study, lectures, concerts, and protection in various ways.

Madison Square is three miles from the Battery; and Broadway, emerging from its upper corner, runs for two miles in a rather irregular diagonal across the line of the avenues, through a region of shops, apartment-hotels, churches, and houses, to Central Park, where the most vexed and crowded and trampled street in the world happily loses itself among the delicious lawns and the shadowy trees.

The Faubourg St. Germain of America is the region included between Lexington Avenue and Sixth Avenue, Madison Square and Central Park, a district about half a mile wide, and a mile and a half long. Here dwell the Croesuses of New Amsterdam, the old patrician families, the less-old aristocrats, the new-rich-the descendants of the De Peysters and Livingstons, as well as the recently-crowned petroleum and railway princes. Lexington Avenue, Madison Avenue, above all the famous Fifth Avenue, and the thirtyfive streets which join them, are crowded with the homes of the men who make their fortunes in the busy whirl towards Wall Street and the Battery. Enormous as the

1, Union Square; 2, The Worth Monument, Madison Square; 3, Porch of the Church of Heavenly Rest; 4, The Masonic Temple; 5, Statue in Madison Square; 6, National Academy of Design.

estates are which these homes represent, and costly as the buildings are, their external effect is not satisfactory. They stand in blocks, built with a They stand in blocks, built with a regularity which is utterly monotonous, a simplicity which gives no relief, and a sombreness of unbroken vistas of dark-brown stone which becomes oppressive. The houses are high and narrow, and equipped internally with all the luxuries, the health-preserving devices, and labour-saving appliances of the nineteenth century. Hundreds of these citizens could buy Malmaison, or Miramar, or San Donato, with a few months of their income; and many of them own stately and emparked mansions on the Hudson river; but they prefer the joyous life of the city, with its rush of business by day and its social festivities by night. The luxurious parlours, picture galleries, boudoirs, and libraries of these homes are foreshadowed by their entrances, rising at the head of stone stairways, with narrow grass-plots between the basement and the side-walks. Nowhere does the defensive or the formidable appear, as in Paris and London, but the plate-glass in the inner doors, the flowers growing in vases and tubs, the vines trailing over the elaborate pillars and porches, give an air of cheerful hospitality and peaceful security. Even Anthony Trollope, in his very acid treatise on North America, found grace to say that Fifth Avenue "is certainly a fine street. The houses in it are magnificent, not having that aristocratic look which some of our detached London residences enjoy, or the palatial appearance of an old-fashioned hotel at Paris, but an air of comfortable luxury and commercial wealth which is not excelled by the best houses of any other town that I know." The absolute sovereigns of these domiciles are the daughters of the old families, arbitrary, wayward, and fascinating, and, though less beautiful than the ladies of Baltimore and less intellectual than those of Boston, gifted with the social graces to such a degree that they stand easily foremost. London and Paris have felt and enjoyed their power; and if Mr. Darwin is correct in assigning the cause of the physical beauty of the English upper classes to their wise selection of beautiful wives, he must endorse the sagacity of many nobles of the Victorian age, who have borne off their brides, willing Sabine captives, from the brown-stone palaces of New York. The jeunesse dorée affords matter for much pleasant and pungent satire in the society novels and verses of the day. These wealthy young men, to whom a trip to Europe is a frequent holiday episode, have become saturated with English ideas and manners, and reproduce the dialogues of Pall Mall in the club-houses of Fifth Avenue. The oddities of the London vernacular are carefully transplanted and cherished; the Court Journal is studied with loyal earnestness; and even the clothing of these Anglicised patricians is made in London. Coaching and polo have been introduced direct from the White Horse Inn and Aldershot, and astonish the suburban villagers; and an amusing imitation of riding to hounds is practised over the adjacent New Jersey farms.

The best estate of Fifth Avenue appears on a pleasant Sunday, after morning service, or in the afternoon, when thousands of promenaders occupy the side-walks, and the roadway is filled with a great variety of equipages. The pomps and vanities of this world are admirably displayed, and the latest inventions of Worth and Pond emerge from the deeparched portals of the cathedrals, churches, and chapels, and join in the dignified procession up the Avenue. The Sunday afternoon stroll along Fifth Avenue is as much de rigueur as the Monday afternoon saunter down Broadway.