"capital fit," that German tobacconist with a creamy meerschaum.
At the artificial Spa he may recuperate with Vichy or Kissingen, and at
the phrenologist's have his mental and moral aptitudes defined; now a
"medium" invites him to a spiritual _seance_, and now an antiquarian to
a "curiosity shop." In one saloon is _lager_ such as he drank in
Bavaria, and in another, the best bivalves in the world. Here is a fine
billiard-table, there a gymnasium;--food for mind and body,
gratification to taste;--all the external resources of civilization are
at hand,--not always with the substantial superiority of those of London
or the elegant variety of Paris, but with enough of both to make them
available to the eclectic cosmopolite.

The historical epochs of New York are adequately traceable by the
successive pictures of her main thoroughfare,--beginning with the Indian
village and the primeval forest which Henry Hudson found on the island
of Manhattan in 1609, and advancing to the stockade fort of New
Amsterdam, built where the Battery now is, by Wouter Van Twiller, the
second Dutch governor, and thence to the era when the fur trade,
tobacco-growing, and slavery were enriching the India Company, when the
Wall was built on the site of the so-called financial rendezvous, to
protect the settlement from savage invasion, and a deep valley marked
the present junction of Canal Street and Broadway. The advent of a new
class of artisans signalizes the arrival of Huguenot emigrants; the
rebellion of Leisler marks the encroachment of new political agencies,
and the substitution of Pitt's statue for that of George III. on the
Bowling Green in 1770, the dawn of Independence, so sturdily ushered in
and cherished by the Liberty Boys, and culminating in the evacuation of
the British in 1783, the entrance of Washington with the American army,
and, two years after, in the meeting of the first Congress. These
vicissitudes left their impress on the street. Every church but the
Episcopal was turned by the English into a riding-school, prison, or
stable; each successive charter was more liberal in its municipal
privileges. The Boston stage long went from the Fort to the Park, and so
on by the old post-road, and was fourteen days _en route_; pestilence,
imported from the West India islands, depopulated the adjacent houses;
water was sold from carts; and dimly lighted was the pedestrian on his
midnight way, while old-fashioned watchmen cried the hour; and