“While his refusal to perform the funeral rites for my old friend would have shocked, under ordinary circumstances, the fact that it was made in the presence of the dead man’s son was more painful than I can describe.  I turned to look at the youth and saw that his eyes were filled with tears.  He stood as one dazed with a blow just realized; as if he felt the terrible injustice of a reproach upon the kind and loving father who had often kissed him in his sleep and had taken him upon his lap when a boy old enough to know the meaning of the words and told him to grow up to be an honest lad.  I was hurt for my young friend and indignant with the man—­too much so to reply, and as I rose to leave the room with a mortification that I cannot remember to have felt before or since, I paused at the door and said:  ’Well, sir, in this dilemma, is there no other church to which you can direct me from which my friend can be buried?’ He replied that ‘There was a little church around the corner’ where I might get it done—­to which I answered, ’Then if this be so, God bless the Little Church Around the Corner,’ and so I left the house.”

A photograph from the collection of J. Clarence Davies, reproduced in the book issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank, shows Grant’s funeral procession climbing the slope of Murray Hill, August 8, 1885, and passing the residences of John Jacob Astor and William B. Astor, on the sites of which is the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel of the present.  The house of John Jacob was at Thirty-third Street, and that of William B. at Thirty-fourth Street, and there was a garden between shut off from the Avenue by a ten-foot brick wall.  The Waldorf, named after the little town of Waldorf, Germany, the ancestral home of the family, occupies the site of the John Jacob house, and was opened March 14, 1893.  Four and a half years later, on November 1, 1897, the Astoria came formally into being, and the two hotels linked by the hyphen and merged under one management.  That point where Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross is one of the great corners of New York.  It is the one that made the profoundest impression on Arnold Bennett:  “The pale-pillared, square structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a background of the lofty red of the AEolian Building, and the great white store on the opposite pavement.”  A city of amazement has been left behind.  Here we are at the threshold of still another city.  It is different at every hour of the day.  But whether we see it in the sweet-scented dawn, or at high noon, or at the shopping hour, or later, when, to use Arnold Bennett’s words, “the street lamps flicker into a steady, steely blue, and the windows of the hotels and restaurants throw a yellow radiance, and all the shops—­especially the jewellers’ shops—­become enchanted treasure houses, whose interiors recede away behind their facades into infinity,” it is ever the essence of our New York of Anno Domini 1918.