Fulton Street, from the great newspaper offices in Park Row, to the principal Brooklyn ferry-house. When they reach the East River, they might almost as well (for all the sparks of animation visible) be on the brink of Dante's Cimmerian stream, which

"All the woes hems in of all the universe."

inhabitants on every floor; the confluent streets pour increasing crowds upon the wharves, and the air rings with the Wagnerian rhythm of the commotion. The friction of the multitude, the variety of color and structure, the quaintness of many buildings, the gracefulness and poetic suggestiveness of the ships, and the impetuous system of the traffic, are some of the things that make the scene particularly charming and exhilarating.

There are sounds: the tide whispers around the piers; the footsteps of the belated pedestrians, the dip of oars, and the hollow thud of paddles, echo The bowsprits of magnificent clippers reach so with preternatural clearness; but these lend the far across the street that they endanger the windows force of contrast to the sepulchral silence with- of the stores; voluminous sails, whose snowy whiteout breaking it, and in the same way the few lights ness has been stained brown and yellow by tropical in sight make the blackness in which they hang heat and mid-ocean brine, hang out from the spars blacker. A schooner drifts inertly with the tide, her in the sun; in some instances canvas banners are sails looming in mid-air like the wings of a mon- unrolled from the foremasts, announcing the names, strous night-bird, and her steering-lamps gleaming destinations, and sailing-dates, of the ships; a faint red and green like a pair of dragon-eyes; a ques- odor of tar flavors the air, and a few of the buildtionable row-boat shoots across the quivering reflec-ings have been so amended and amplified by detions thrown out by the lights on the piers; the tached portions of vessels that they are like old ferry-boat, with her cabin-windows shining, crosses wrecks cast high and dry upon a beach. and recrosses at long intervals. But it is as deathly I think we can detect an unconscious sort of enstill as a Sierra pine-forest; the towers of the Brook-joyment in all the promenaders of this busy riverlyn Bridge rise out of the darkness like two massive street; the careworn faces are lightened by the mountain-buttes; the masts and cordage of the ship-pleasurable sensations of its commercial activity and ping form a pen-and-ink network against the sky; the vast metropolis and its harbor are fast asleep and dreaming.

The dream lasts until the earliest russet streak of dawn shows itself over Corlear's Hook, and then the sleeping giant into which our fancy has transfigured the city murmurs and stirs; the relaxed pulse of business dilates with new currents, and the nightly lethargy is overcome in a flood of burning energy. The awakening is like the starting of a great, complicated machine: the first motions are cautious and slow; but, as the velocity increases, the various parts become blurred in the seeming confusion of a perfect unison.

The little tow-boats moored to the wharves are the earliest heralds of the morning; as their fires are lighted, gray coils of smoke and white threads of steam roll out of their funnels, and, while it is yet dark, they evince a predisposition to that exuberant vitality which characterizes them when they are under way. The ferry-boats multiply like the brass spheres of a conjurer, and their decks are crowded with laborers; from corners that have been sealed in shadows, unsuspected vehicles of commerce emerge; a hundred new routes are opened; and, almost before the tired-out newspaper-men are in their well-earned beds, the stream that was so silent and unburdened when they crossed it is animated beyond description by a dazzling fleet of steam and sailing vessels.

Upon the wharves, and along the river-streets, a similar transformation takes place. The reader has probably seen those surprising developments of a pantomime by which water-lilies unfold charming young women, and bulrushes are turned to gnomes. In the same spontaneous and inexplicable way gangs of laborers and horses seem to be evolved out of the packages of freight; the dreamy old stores reveal

picturesque variety; but the medium through which the real sentiment of the scene reflects itself is the boy with nautical aspirations-the slender little fellow with pathetically hopeful eyes—whom we meet from time to time, watching with keen absorption the loading and unloading of vessels. His view is introspective, and what he sees leads his mind beyond the external objects visible to the many other and wider phases of maritime life.

As we purpose making a complete tour of the wharves, our starting-point shall be far up the East River, and thence we will follow the water-front to the Battery; from the Battery to the North River, and up the North River to the edge of the suburbs -an itineracy that will allow us to see in greater detail the extent of the dock facilities and the diversity of the harbor's commerce.

Above Corlear's Hook the river widens, but the traffic is not as great as it is lower down, very little shipping being docked above Grand Street. The piers here are quiet; the vessels moored to them are out of service, or under repairs, or awaiting a charter, and a crippled old watchman is the last remnant of the crew. On warm afternoons a few unpretentious anglers-laborers out of work-drowsily play for a bite, and on Sundays whole families of working-people from the overcrowded tenements of the neighborhood cluster in the spots where the breeze from the river is strongest.

Just across the stream at Greenpoint, on the Brooklyn shore, there are some ship-building yards, in which the white frames of the embryo vessels on the stocks are visible; and a short distance to the north are the oil-docks of Hunter's Point, from which petroleum of various grades is exported.

Occasionally the great reservoirs of oil adjoining the docks take fire, and a gorgeous and comparatively inexpensive conflagration results. The writer re

out the magnificent combustion; and the ferry-boats passed to and fro until morning in the floods of a weird, chromatic light, compared with which Western sunsets are pale.

wreck, her thick plates dimpled with the hemispheres of hundreds of cannon-balls, which had struck them without penetrating; her deck torn up by shells, and her smoke-stack bent and indented. Side by side The great iron-works are in the neighborhood of with these shattered veterans were new white riverTenth Street, and steamers that are being disman- steamers, and larger sea-going steamers, into which tled or refitted lie at the adjacent piers, which are engines and boilers were being placed by demon-like covered with a miscellaneous and dingy heap of mechanics-mechanics, dressed in black and greasy fragments-the separated sections of marine engines, overalls, whose fierce-looking eyes were set in ebony rusty boiler-plates, battered smoke-stacks, and green Ifaces, and whose hammers were rained upon the copper sheathings. Few things are more melan-bolts and plates with vindictive energy. As the ring choly than a dismantled ship. Some time ago I found the ruined hulk of the Ocean Queen at one of these wharves; in the palmy days of the Panama route to California, she had been true to her namebut what forlorn changes time had made in her! Her broken rigging draggled from the masts and spars; the seams between her timbers gaped, and the paint was peeling off. The two funnels were battered and red with rust. The once cozy little staterooms opening on the upper deck, in which the warm tropical winds had fanned the grateful passen

of the hammers was borne over the water it became musical, and several piers off it sounded like the strains of an Æolian harp.1

1 The inspiriting music of the ship-building yard is not common in New York Harbor, but it is heard oftener every year, and the progression is encouraging. The sailing-vessels built at this port in 1875 were two barks, two brigs, twenty-one schooners, and thirty-seven sloops, with a total tonnage of 7,334 tons; and the steam-vessels built were thirty-six propellers for river purposes, and two propellers for ocean navigation, with a total tonnage of 5,463 tons. The other vessels built

were twenty-four canal-boats, with a total tonnage of 2,466

The smoke-stacks lying prone, and the old boilers, on the piers of the iron-works, are propitious shelters for the outcasts of the city, and those who succeed in escaping the notice of the watchmen steal into them at night, and sleep in their reverberant darkness with a warmth and an amplitude of space impossible in the doorways or ash - barrels. The vagabond element is conspicuous on the quiet up-town wharves. Unhealthy children and frouzy men loiter upon them, watching and listening to the tide as it murmurs a siren-song around the supporting timbers, and promises swift oblivion at the small cost of one desperate plunge. Now and then the oozy, pallid body of a man, or woman, who has accepted the invitation, appears in the translucent depths, and is borne to the Morgue, which is in that gray pile of buildings at the foot of Twenty-sixth Street-the Bellevue Hospital. A little steamer glides up the river from the hospital-wharf several times a week with the city's unmourned pauper dead. Unmourned? No! not quite. The reader may sometimes see a sorrowful face watching that funereal little vessel as she steams away with her silent passengers to Potter's Field-the face of a brother, sister, father, or mother, and a pair of eyes that are blinded with grief long before she has disappeared from the view of the other lookers-on.

board of her for service in the mercantile marine. The best argument in her favor is the fact that her crew is German, the captain having actually been unable to procure twenty able-bodied, intelligent Americans suited to his ship. The pupils are drilled in common English, seamanship, and navigation, for two years, at the expiration of which period they are supposed to be in a mental and physical condition to do credit to themselves as American sailors. The ship, with its officers, is loaned by the United States to the local Commissioners of Education, by whom the school is maintained, the pupils being charged thirty-seven dollars for an outfit, and nothing for board or tuition.

As we proceed southward the traffic quickens, and by noon it is at a white heat, but the sky and atmosphere remain clear and brilliant. The smallest blocks in the highest foretops, and the slenderest threads of rigging, are distinct. There are dreary, misty days when the water-front is veiled in moist gray, and the air is filled with the alarming screams of steam-whistles and the chimes of fog-bells, but such days are uncommon; the usual day is dazzlingly fine, and the traffic throws off few bedimming clouds.

From the wharves at which ships undergoing repairs are lying-some of them with the old plankThe nautical school-ship, St. Mary's, is anchored ing torn from their ribs above the water-line, pre

at the foot of Twenty-third Street, and about one- | liminary to the substitution of new material, and hundred and twenty boys are being trained on

others noisy with the clatter of calkers' mallets, and redolent of oakum and boiling pitch-we approach the dry docks in which vessels are raised, high and dry, for repairs to their bottoms, and in which their proportions are fully discovered-the effect produced by an ocean-steamer or a large clipper being somewhat startling.