cannot yet twist my tongue into calling it "Manhattan") by a
five minutes' journey on the East River Bridge, is a very different town
in its political and social aspects. New York is penned in on a narrow
island, and ground is worth more than gold. It is therefore piled up
with very fine apartment houses for the rich, or tenement houses for the
poor to more stories than the ancient buildings on the Canongate of
Edinburgh. Here in Brooklyn we have all Long Island to spread over, and
land is within the reach of even a parson's purse. A man never feels so
rich as when he owns a bit of real estate, and I take some satisfaction
in the bit of land in the front of my domicile, and in the rear, capable
of holding several fruit trees and rose-beds. Oxford Street has the deep
shade of a New England village. We come to know our neighbors here,
which is a degree of knowledge not often attained in New York or London.
The social life here is also less artificial than at the other end of
the bridge. There is less of the foreign element, and of either great
wealth or poverty; we have neither the splendor of Paris, nor the
squalor of the by-streets of Naples. The name of "Breucklen" was given
to our town by its original Dutch settlers, but the aggressive New
Englanders pushed in and it is a more thoroughly Yankee city to-day than
any city in the land outside of New England. My old friend, Mayor Low,
urged the consolidation of Brooklyn with New York on the ground that its
moral and civic influence would be a wholesome counteraction of Tammany
and the tenement-house politics. For self-protection, I joined with my
lamented brother, the late Dr. Storrs, in an effort to maintain our
independence. Ours is pre-eminently a city of homes where the bulk of
the people live in an undivided dwelling, and I do not believe that
there is another city either in America, or elsewhere, that contains
over a million inhabitants, so large a proportion of whom are in a
school house during the week, and in God's house on the Sabbath.

[Illustration: THE LAFAYETTE AVENUE CHURCH.]

One of the glories of Brooklyn is its vast and picturesque "Prospect
Park," with natural forests, hills and dales and its superb outlook over
the bay and ocean.

I hope that it may not be a violation of propriety to say that the Park
Commissioners in this city of my adoption bestowed my own name on a
pretty plot of ground not far from my residence; and its bright show of
flowers mak