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Ladies having Schools to employ

Supplied with all the Laces, Works, Linen, Long-cloth, &c.
necessary for the "Trousseau."

Lace Collars and Sleeves, Cambric Handkerchiefs. MARRIAGE OUTFITS COMPLETE.

White Dressing Gowns, 1 Guinea;

Cotton Hosiery, 2s. 6d.;

Patent Corsets, 16s. 6d.

Real Balbriggan Hosiery.

THIS PART OF THE BUSINESS UNDER THE

MANAGEMENT OF MRS. TAYLOR.

LADIES' RIDING TROUSERS,
Chamois Leather, with Black Feet.

Waterproof Riding Talma, 1 Guinea,
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School ditto, 25s.

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Naval Cadets' Outfits, complete.

RIDING HABITS, 5 TO 8 GUINEAS.

Lindsey Riding Habits

for little girls,

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Everything of the Superior Excellence for which the House has been

Celebrated for Thirty Years.

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MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

APRIL, 1862.

THREE

WEEKS IN NEW YORK.

BY OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN AMERICA.

ANY city in the world-Hull itself— would look charming to me after a dreary stormy voyage. Our passage was, I suppose, much as other passages are, of the water, watery. We had the stock experiences. We had a storm and got amongst the ice, and were enveloped in a fog. We sighted a ship or two; saw, or fancied we saw, a whale; and were visited by a sparrow in the middle of the Atlantic. These are the sole external incidents of the voyage I can call to mind. Of our internal life there is even less to say. We ate very plentifully, slept very long, and dozed constantly. We tried very hard to amuse ourselves, and failed lamentably. We told the same stock stories, heard the same stock songs, and played at the same stock games. Being at sea, we did as seamen do. We were first absurdly stiff, then unreasonably familiar, then personally offensive to each other, and finally quarrelsome. We had no ladies amongst us, but we talked as much gossip, and spread as much scandal about one another, as if we had been a crew of old maids. In short, we were very, very dull; and with this much of mention I am content to let my voyage float out of memory.

Still, apart from the charm of seeing land again, the approach through the Narrows into the land-locked bay of New York will remain in my mind as one of the loveliest scenes that I have

ever looked upon. Out of the cold chill grey dawn, as I stood shivering on No. 30.-YOL. V.

Past

deck, watching for the first glimpses of the New World, the sun rose in a mass of fire, as I had last seen it rise, far away, across the Gulf of Spezia. The dim haze rolled away, and the sky grew clear and blue, like an Italian sky when the Tramontana wind is blowing from the north; and, were it not that the hill slopes, which hemmed in the bay on every side, were covered with white sparkling snow, and that one's fingers tingled with a chill numbing cold, I might have fancied myself back in Italy. But the brightness of the air and the glitter of the sunlight removed the depression which cold always exercises on one's mental faculties; and, even at the risk of frost-bitten toes, I lingered on deck to gaze upon the view. Sandy Hook Fort, where the stars and stripes were floating gaily, close beneath the wooded banks of Staten Island, where villas of wood, villas of stone, villas with Doric porticoes, Swiss cottages, and Italian mansions, seemed to succeed each other in a never ending panorama, we floated onwards, towards the low long black line, which marked the city of New York. The waters of the bay were calm and blue, like those of a southern sea; and against the banks great masses of snow-covered ice lay huddled closely, while loose blocks, sparkling in the sunlight, came floating past us seawards with the ebbing tide. The fairy pilot-boats with their snowwhite sails shot across our path; vessels bearing the flag of every nation under

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the sun were dropping down with the tide; English and French men-of-war lay anchored in the bay; and the strange American river steam-boats, which look as though in an access of sea sickness they had thrown their cabins inside out and turned their engines upside down, glided around us in every direction. So we steamed slowly on, till the island city-a sort of Venice without canalslay before us, half hidden by the forest of masts which girds its shores, like a palisade, and we were on land at last.

It is not my purpose to describe New York, or its sights and curiosities. The description has been given a dozen times before, and probably better than I could do it. Then, too, New York, like all American cities, has one peculiarity, not altogether unpleasing to a somewhat "blasé" sightseer; and that is, that it has no sights to see. I believe there is a gallery somewhere in the city, and a public building or two which are supposed to possess architectural merits. There is the Croton aqueduct also, which is interesting to engineers. But I have not seen these sights, and have no intention of describing them; still less of visiting them. It is the social state of New York-the real capital of the United States-about which I have sought to pick up what information it has lain in my power to reach, and about which, I believe, the readers of Macmillan will feel much interest. I do not profess to give a complete and detailed account of the manners, politics, society, and religion of New York, done in three weeks' time; but even in twentyone days, if you have your eyes about you and keep your ears open, you may learn a good deal worth learning; and it is the result of these impressions of mine--fugitive and disjointed, as they inevitably are that I wish to convey to you.

First, however, let me say something about the outward look of the city. New York is not a show place, and has, architecturally, but little claim to distinction. The plan of the city is wonderfully simple; and it is this that makes the arithmetical nomenclature of the streets,

which seems so barbarous to us in Europe, of such great practical convenience. If you suppose that the skeleton of a sole had a number of cross-bones parallel to the back-bone, you will have an exact idea of the plan of New York. The back-bone is the Broadway; the parallel cross-bones are the Avenues; and the bones at right angles to the back-bone are the Streets, numbered consecutively from the sole's mouth. The system is not perfect, because the streets in the old part of the city have names of their own; but still it is sufficiently so to enable any one to tell, given the name of a street, whereabouts it is situated. The lower end of the island, corresponding to the sole's mouth, is the commercial part, the "city" of New York. Broadway is the great thoroughfare, where all the chief stores and shops are situated ; and Fifth Avenue, with the streets running across it, is the fashionable quarter-the "Belgravia" of the town. Across the middle of the island stretches the Central Park; and beyond that, towards the tail of the sole, are long straggling suburbs, which threaten, in ten years' time, if New York were to grow at its present rate, to cover the whole island of Manhattan. So much for the topography of New York. Its general effect is to me disappointing. Simple size is never very striking to any one accustomed to London; and, except in size, there is little to strike you here. Broadway is, or, rather, ought to be, a very fine street; and the single stores are as handsome as anything can be in the way of the shop-front order of architecture. But a marble-faced palace of six stories high has a cast-iron store with card-paper looking pillars on one side, and a two storied red brick house on the other. There is no symmetry or harmony about the street; and, when I heard a candid Yankee describe it as "a 'onehorse' Boulevarde," I thought he had produced a description which could not be improved upon. Fifth Avenue is symmetrical enough-but its semi-detached stone mansions, handsome as they are, lack sufficient height to give grandeur to the street, while its monotony is

dreadful. The other fashionable streets are inferior editions of the Fifth Avenue, and impress me, as our own districts of Tyburnia and Belgravia always do, with two reflections-firstly, what an enormous amount of wealth there must be in a country where such vast numbers of people can afford to live in such houses; and, secondly, how little artistic taste there must be, where people with such incomes consent to live in houses of such architectural unattractiveness. The poorer streets, along the banks of the island, have no architectural pretensions, and bear a strong family resemblance to the Walworth Road or to Mile End Gate. The churches, with their tall taper steeples, relieve the uniformity of the city; but, like all our modern style of ecclesiastical architecture, they are not vast enough to be imposing. In fact, if you could transpose New York to England, it would be, externally, as uninteresting a city as Manchester. But here, in this bright clear air, there is a sort of French sparkle about the place which enlivens it strangely.

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It is indoors, however, not out of doors, that the charm of New York is found. There is not much of luxury, in the French sense of the word-no lavish display of mirrors, and clocks, and pictures; but there is more comfort, more English luxury, about the dwelling-houses than I ever saw in England. All the domestic arrangements (to use a fine word for grog, hot water, &c.) are wonderfully perfect. Everything, even than in England, seems adapted for a home life. From the severity of the winters, there can be little out-of-door life at this season of the year; but, under any circumstances, there appears to be not much of public life. For this reason, New York must be a dull place to a stranger without acquaintances. There are no cafés; and the nearest approach to them, the hotel bar-rooms, are not places where you can sit down, or find any amusement except that of drinking. So, in the hotels themselves, there is less society than I had expected from the accounts of other travellers. The public sitting-rooms appear to be little used,

except to receive visitors; and at the table d'hôte there is an absence of general conversation, compared with a continental one. It is very contrary to English notions that a family should take up their residence at an hotel at all; but, granted this fact, American families live in an hotel much on the same footing as English ones would do under like circumstances that is, they keep themselves to themselves, and see but little of their next-door neighbours.

But, in truth, everything here is so different from what one would expect it to be in theory. Under a democratic republic, where practically the suffrage is universal, one would expect that in all social matters the convenience and interests of the individual would be sacrificed to those of the public. The very contrary is the case. The principle of vested rights the power of every individual to consult his own inclination, in defiance of his neighbour's convenience is carried here to a perfect absurdity. Anybody may build his house after his own fancy, in total disregard of the architectural style of the houses by which it is surrounded. Anybody may stop his cart or carriage where he likes; and so I have seen Wall Street, in its busiest hours, blocked up by a stoppage, caused by some brewer's dray, which chose to stand still at the side of the narrow street. Anybody has a right to get into the cars or omnibuses, as long as he can squeeze his way in; and so the cars in themselves the most comfortable conveyances I ever travelled in-are rendered at times almost insufferable, by the fact that the space between the seats is filled by extra passengers, standing on, or in dangerous proximity to, the toes of the seated travellers. The illustration, however, of this feeling, which most strikes a stranger, is the state of the public streets. It has been my fortune, or misfortune, in life, to ride over a good number of bad roads; but no road I have come across is to compare with Broadway during the late snows. When it froze hard at night, the street was a succession of Montagnes Russes, up

and down which the carriages slide wildly. Over the pavement lay a coating of some three or four feet of snow, indented with holes, and furrows, and ridges, of most alarming magnitude. Whenever there was a temporary thaw, this mass of ice and snow became a pond of slush-a very slough of despond. Without exaggeration, crossing the main streets was a work of danger. Falls of foot-passengers were things of constant occurrence, while the struggles of the horses to drag the carriages out of the ruts were really painful to witness. I believe the state of the streets was somewhat worse than usual this winter; but every year there is more or less of this sort of thing. The one cause of all this obstruction is that the contractor, who has undertaken to keep the streets clear, has failed to fulfil the spirit, if not the letter of his contract. Everybody grumbles-just as we do in London, when a gas company stops up the Strand for the sake of tinkering its pipes; but nobody proposes to interfere and insist on the nuisance being removed. The vested right of the individual contractor overrides the convenience of the public.

Another popular delusion too, in England, is, that New York is a sort of gingerbread and gilt city, and that, contrasted with an English city, there is a want of solidity about the place, materially as well as morally. On the contrary, I was never in a town where, externally, at any rate, show was so much sacrificed, to solid comfort. The ferries, the cars, the railroads, and the houses are all arranged so as to give one substantial comfort without external decoration. As long as a contrivance serves its purpose, little care seems to be felt about how it looks. To economize labour and to avoid unnecessary outlay are the great objects of all American contrivances. It is indeed to this cause, more than to any abstract feeling of republican equality, that I attribute the absence of private cars on the railroads. The large public carriages carry as many passengers as three of our railroad carriages would do; and, with the bad gradients, and comparatively powerless

engines of the American lines, such an advantage is of immense importance. In the same way, nobody attributes the absence of cabs in New York to any democratic objection to the use of private vehicles. The simple fact is that cabs do not pay, because the elaborate system of omnibuses and cars conveys passengers practically to all parts of the city, and the public does not care about paying extra for privacy.

Undoubtedly, out of doors, you see evidences of a public equality, or rather absence of inequality, among all classes, which cannot fail to strike an inhabitant of the Old World. In the street, the man in the hat and broadcloth coat, and the man in corduroys and jacket out at elbows, never get out of each other's way, or expect the other to make way for him. In the cars, ladies and washerwomen, working men and gentlemen, sit hustled together without the slightest sense of incongruity. In the shops, and from the servants, you meet with perfect civility, but with civility as to an equal, not to a superior. In the bar rooms, there is no distinction of customers; and, as long as you pay your way, and behave quietly, you are welcome, whatever your dress may be. No doubt, the cause of this general equality is the absence of the class brutalized by poverty, which you see in our great cities. There is a great deal of poverty in New York, and the Five Points quarter-the Seven Dials of the cityis, especially on a bitter winter's day, as miserable a haunt of vice and misery as it was ever my lot to witness in the Old World. Still, compared with the size of New York, this quarter is a very small one, and poverty here, bad as it is, is not hopeless poverty. The fleeting population of the "Five Points" is composed of the lowest and most shiftless of the foreign emigrants; and, in the course of a few years, they, or at any rate their children, move to other quarters, and become prosperous and respectable. There is, for an AngloSaxon population, very little drunkenness visible in the streets of New York; and, with regard to other forms of public

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