D OWN along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by. Coastwise schooners, lumber-laden, which can get far up the river under their own sail; big, full-rigged clipper ships that have to be towed from the lower bay, their topmasts down in order to scrape under the Brooklyn Bridge; barques, brigs, brigantines—all sorts of sailing craft, with cargoes from all seas, and flying the flags of all nations. White-painted river steamers that seem all the more flimsy and riverish if they

T HE walk up-town reaches from the bottom of the buzzing region where money is made to the bright zone where it is spent and displayed; and the walk is a delight all the way. It is full of variety, color, charm, exhilaration—almost intoxication, on its best days. Indeed, there are connoisseurs in cities who say that of all walks of this sort in the world New York's is the best. The walk in London from the city to the West End by way of Fleet Street, the Strand, and Piccadilly, is teeming with in

Many good New Yorkers (chiefly, however, of that small per cent. born in New York, who generally know rather little about their town except that they love it) have not been so remotely far down the island as Battery Park for a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses of the good old Row (though once called "Mushroom Row") opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green, where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de Peyste

This comes nearer to being monotonous than any part of the walk. But even here, to lure the walker on, far ahead, almost exactly in the centre of the cañon of commercial Broadway, can be seen the pure white spire of Grace Church, planted there at the bend of the thoroughfare, as if purposely to stand out like a beacon and signal to those below that Broadway changes at last and that up there are some Christians. But there are always plenty of people to look at, nor are they all black-mustached, b

At last Grace Church, with its clean light stone, is reached; and the green grass and shrubbery in front of the interesting-looking Gothic rectory. It is a glad relief. And now—in fact, a little before this point—about where stood that melancholy building bearing the plaintive sign "Old London Street"—which was used now for church services and now prize-fights and had never been much of a success at anything—about here, the up-town walkers notice (unless lured off to the left by the thick tree-t

Now this last lap of the walk—from green Madison Square and the new Martin's up the sparkling avenue to the broad, bright Plaza at the Park entrance, where the brightly polished hotels look down at the driving, with their awnings flapping and flags out straight—makes the most popular part of all the walk. This is the land of liveried servants and jangling harness, far away, or pretending to be, from work and worry; this is where enjoyment is sought and vanity let loose—and that, with the accompa

A CITY should be laid out like a golf links; except for an occasional compromise in the interest of art or expediency it should be allowed to follow the natural topography of the country. But this is not the way the matter was regarded by the commission appointed in 1807 to lay out the rural regions beyond New York, which by that time had grown up to the street now called Houston, and then called North Street, probably because it seemed so far north—though, to be sure, there were scattered hamle

These are the streets which visitors to New York always remark; the characteristic cross streets of the typical up-town region of long regular rows of rectangular residences that look so much alike, with steep similar steps leading up to sombre similar doors and a doctor's sign in every other window. Bleak, barren, echoing streets where during the long, monotonous mornings "rags-an-bot'l" are called for, and bananas and strawberries are sold from wagons by aid of resonant voices, and nothing els

Down-town it is so different. Down-town—"'way down-town," in the vernacular—in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World arch

These two views across two parts of New York, the two most typical parts, deal chiefly with what a stranger might see and feel, who came and looked and departed. Very little has been said to show what the cross-streets mean to those who are in the town and of it, who know the town and like it—either because their "father's father's father" did, or else because their work or fate has cast them upon this island and kept them there until it no longer seems a desert island. The latter class, indeed,

T HERE is pretty good snipe shooting within the city limits of New York, and I have heard that an occasional trout still rises to the fly in one or two spots along a certain stream—which need not be made better known than it is already, though it can hardly be worth whipping much longer at any rate. A great many ducks, however, are still shot every season in the city, by those who know where to go for them; and as for inferior sport, like rabbits—if you include them as game—on certain days of th

In a way, that is rather typical of most of the rurality found within the boundaries of these modern aggregations or trusts of large and small towns, and intervening country, held together (more or less) by one name, under one municipal government, and called a "city" by legislature. There is plenty that is not at all city-like within the city walls—called limits—there is plenty of nature, but in most cases those wanting to commune with it are reminded that it is no longer within the domain of n

Make a journey out through the open country to the southeast of Flushing, past the Oakland Golf Club, and over toward the Creedmoor Rifle Range, after a while turn north and follow a twisting road that leads down into the ravine at the head of Little Neck Bay, where a few of the many Little Neck clams come from. All of these places are well within the eastern boundary of the city, and this little journey will furnish a very good example of a certain kind of rural New York, but only one kind, for

Pointing out mere farms in the city becomes rather monotonous; they are too common. But there is one kind of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough, in about the centre of the 317 square miles of New York—so well as the centre of a boot-shaped area can be located. Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City, which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets

Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up the Hudson to the mountains—a quiet, sequestered bit of public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the Grant Monument on Riverside. There are

Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature except the highest can find plenty to sigh over in the way the city thrusts itself upon the country. But to those who think that the haunts and habits of the Man are not less worthy of observation than those of the Beaver and the Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not so deeply deplorable. There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on Staten Island—not only t