ion: MAP OF CROTON AQUEDUCT.]

[Illustration: RESERVOIR IN CENTRAL PARK.]

New York has never been a boastful city. It never has filled the world
with the noise of its greatness or the parade of its wonderful
achievements. Its Broadway is the longest thoroughfare in Christendom, I
believe; its suspension-bridge is only excelled by one bridge of another
kind; its actual size and population are second to those of but one
city; but such facts one must glean from the encyclopaedias and the
letters of travellers. The New-Yorkers say nothing about them. Therefore
it is but little known that the aqueduct which carries our water to us
is the greatest--many times the greatest--tunnel in the whole world. It
is more than thirty-three miles in length, and far from being a mere
trench, averages a depth of 170 feet below the surface, and is in places
380 feet underground. It is from ten to thirteen feet high, and averages
nearly as great a width. Its way is hewn through solid rock in places,
and it is everywhere built of brick and granite. It passes under several
rivers, and at the Harlem River, the northern boundary of this island,
it is in the shape of a siphon upside down, sloping for 1300 feet under
the river, and then rising 400 feet straight up through the Manhattan
Island bank of the stream. It cost nearly $27,000,000, and it brings,
without pumping, by the incline of the tunnel, nearly 100 gallons of
water a day for each of the 1,900,000 persons in the city, or about
171,000,000 gallons of water a day for all of us. It is a solid cube of
water running at the rate of two miles an hour, eight or ten feet thick,
and ten or a dozen feet high.

[Illustration: THE OLD WAY.]

We are in the habit of saying that the water we drink comes from Croton
Lake, thirty miles north of the city in Westchester County, but that is
only a part of the truth. The fact is, that Croton Lake was made by
damming the Croton River when our system was begun in 1835-42. We now
take that water, and the water of several other lakes, ponds, and rivers
that are in a great valley or depression in the earth called the Croton
watershed. We keep stored up and ready for use about 17,000,000,000
gallons of water in the following natural and artificial reservoirs:
Croton Lake, Lake Mahopac, Lake Gilead, and Kirk Lake, Middle Branch,
East Branch, Bog Brook, and Barrett Pond. Their names sufficiently
describe the character of these great goblets of crystal water whic