early settlers could only have seen the proud and amazing
thoroughfare!

The air vibrant with excitement. Flags everywhere. Tens of thousands of
the Stars and Stripes. Thousands of Union Jacks and Tricolours of
France. Hundreds of pavilions of Italy and Belgium. Every few yards
gaily decorated booths from which smiling women or lusty-lunged men
harangued the passers-by to "come across or the Kaiser will."

On a platform erected on the steps in front of the Public Library a
slight figure in kilts addressing a swaying, surging crowd. As the bus,
held up for a minute by the cross-town traffic, stopped, we could hear
the pleasing burr of Harry Lauder. Two hours later; a mile and a half
farther downtown. The sound of a band in the distance. The horses of the
mounted policemen forcing back the curious thousands to the curb. A
regiment of regulars, two regiments of militia, and then, swinging along
lightly in loose step, a handful of men in soiled blue, Chasseurs a pied
of France, who, at Verdun, in the Vosges Mountains, and on the Picardy
front, had lived splendidly up to the traditions of the men with the
hairy knapsacks and the hearts of steel whose tramp had shaken the
continent of Europe one hundred years before.

It was just a day similar to other days that had gone before and to days
that were to follow. To feel the thrill of what were held to have been
the great days of the past we must put ourselves in the mood of old New
York, or at the very least think of the world as it was wagging along a
brief four years ago.

"The national banquet-hall where heroes and statesmen have been feted,
or the parade-ground toward which a nation has turned to witness great
demonstrations in celebration of national events of a civic or military
or mournful nature. Along it have gone to the music of dirges and the
sound of mournful drums the funeral corteges of many of the country's
leading statesmen and greatest men, and here, too, have occurred riots
and disastrous fires which have startled the city and shocked the
nation." So runs the introduction to a little pamphlet issued some years
ago by the Fifth Avenue Bank. One of the earliest and most notable
visits, the brochure goes on to tell us, was that of the then Prince of
Wales, later Edward VII., in the autumn of 1860. He was then nineteen
years old. The city turned out to greet him. On Thursday, October 11th,
the revenue cutter, "Harriet Lane," brought the Prince to New York from