At that school I saw some five or six hundred girls collected in one room, and heard them sing.  The singing was very pretty, and it was all very nice; but I own that I was rather startled, and to tell the truth somewhat abashed, when I was invited to “say a few words to them.”  No idea of such a suggestion had dawned upon me, and I felt myself quite at a loss.  To be called up before five hundred men is bad enough, but how much worse before that number of girls!  What could I say but that they were all very pretty?  As far as I can remember, I did say that and nothing else.  Very pretty they were, and neatly dressed, and attractive; but among them all there was not a pair of rosy cheeks.  How should there be, when every room in the building was heated up to the condition of an oven by those damnable hot-air pipes.

In England a taste for very large shops has come up during the last twenty years.  A firm is not doing a good business, or at any rate a distinguished business, unless he can assert in his trade card that he occupies at least half a dozen houses—­Nos. 105, 106, 107, 108, 109 and 110.  The old way of paying for what you want over the counter is gone; and when you buy a yard of tape or a new carriage—­ for either of which articles you will probably visit the same establishment—­you go through about the same amount of ceremony as when you sell a thousand pounds out of the stocks in propria persona.  But all this is still further exaggerated in New York.  Mr. Stewart’s store there is perhaps the handsomest institution in the city, and his hall of audience for new carpets is a magnificent saloon.  “You have nothing like that in England,” my friend said to me as he walked me through it in triumph.  “I wish we had nothing approaching to it,” I answered.  For I confess to a liking for the old-fashioned private shops.  Harper’s establishment for the manufacture and sale of books is also very wonderful.  Everything is done on the premises, down to the very coloring of the paper which lines the covers, and places the gilding on their backs.  The firm prints, engraves, electroplates, sews, binds, publishes, and sells wholesale and retail.  I have no doubt that the authors have rooms in the attics where the other slight initiatory step is taken toward the production of literature.

New York is built upon an island, which is I believe about ten miles long, counting from the southern point at the Battery up to Carmansville, to which place the city is presumed to extend northward.  This island is called Manhattan, a name which I have always thought would have been more graceful for the city than that of New York.  It is formed by the Sound or East River, which divides the continent from Long Island by the Hudson River, which runs into the Sound, or rather joins it at the city foot, and by a small stream called the Harlem River, which runs out of the Hudson and meanders away into the Sound at the north of the city, thus cutting the city off from the main-land.