excellent business-man who was born in his father's
aristocratic residence in Beaver Street. Holborn is as aristocratic now.
Another friend of mine still living, the freshest of sexagenarians, told
me lately of a walk he took in boyhood which so much fatigued him, that,
when he was a long way out in the fields, he sat down to rest on the
steps of a suburban hospital. I guessed Bellevue; but he replied that it
was the New York Hospital, standing in what we now call the lower part
of Broadway, just opposite North Pearl Street. No part of the Strand or
of the Boulevards is less rural than the vast settled district about the
New York Hospital at this day. It stands at least four times farther
within than it then did beyond the circumference of New York
civilization. I remember another illustration of its relative situation
early in the century,--a story of good old Doctor Stone, who excused
himself from his position of manager by saying, that, as the infirmities
of age grew on him, he found the New York Hospital so far out in the
country that he should be obliged, if he stayed, to keep "a horse and
_cheer_."

Many New-Yorkers, recognized among our young and active men, can
recollect when Houston Street was called North Street because it was
practically the northern boundary of the settled district. Middle-aged
men remember the swamp of Lispenard's Meadow, which is now the dryest
part of Canal Street; some recall how they crossed other parts of the
swamp on boards, and how tide-water practically made a separate island
of what is now the northern and much the larger portion of the city.
Young men recollect making Saturday-afternoon appointments with their
schoolfellows (there was no time on any other day) to go "clear out into
the country," bathe in the rural cove at the foot of East Thirteenth
Street, and, refreshed by their baths, proceed to bird's-nesting on the
wilderness of the Stuyvesant Farm, where is now situate Stuyvesant Park,
one of the loveliest and most elegant pleasure-grounds open to the New
York public, surrounded by one of the best-settled portions of the city,
in every sense of the word. Still younger men remember Fourteenth Street
as the utmost northern limit of the wave of civilization; and
comparative boys have seen Franconi's Hippodrome pitched in a vacant lot
of the suburbs, where now the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands, at the entrance
to a double mile of palaces, in the northern, southern, and western
direc