Over opposite where modest Brooklyn lived its simple, friendly life fifty years ago, stretching out into country ways and green fields, there are miles of houses, and the great bridge is such an everyday affair one hardly gives it a second thought. And all is business now, with tall buildings that the glance can hardly reach. There is no City Hall Park, but a great space of flagging, though the fountain remains. Business crowds hurry to and fro where ladies used to sit and chat while the young people strolled about. Stewart's old marble building is common-place and dingy. Delmonico has gone on up-town stride by stride, and people have forgotten the old balcony where Jenny Lind sang, and Koenig played to a street packed with people. And the Prince de Joinville was here; also Louis Napoleon, the nephew of his uncle, who followed his steps as Emperor and loser of crown and all, and exile. And the young Prince Imperial, whose birth, so long desired and celebrated with state as was that of the young King of Rome, met with as melancholy a fate and early death as the Duc de Reichstadt. And here the young Prince of Wales dined. He came down Broadway with his suite and procession, and the little wife thought it a fine sight as she stood there to see. Broadway stretches on and on. Union Square is really a thoroughfare; but she came up here with father and the boys when it was a grand new thing. Did she really live in First Street with Aunt Daisy for a playmate, and Auntie Reed, and Nora, who was a much admired singer in her day, and who married a Roman Count; and the little Tudie who died? Did she have that splendid Christmas and the beautiful wax doll, that seems sacredly alive to them both; only under some spell of enchantment laid upon her by Merlin's clan? Oh, how full the streets are now with their great high tenement-houses, pouring out their myriads of children all day long, of every nationality! But you still hear the old plays, "Open the Gates," and "Scotland's Burning," and "Uncle John is very Sick," and "Ring around a Rosy." Little Sally Waters still sits in the sun,-- "Crying and sighing for a young man," though modern poesy advises her to-- "Rise, Sally, rise, Wipe your eyes out with your frock." And the strange Chinatown, with its cabalistic signs, its men in blue shirts and pigtails, and often snowy white stockings and queer pointed slippers! They wind slowly about Central Park. Was the Crystal Palace here? And no park? To them it seems as if New York must have been born this way, with electric lights, and push-buttons, and telephones, and cars, and telegraphs, and everything. And did grandmamma come up here to the Fair; and was it anything like the Museum of Art? And wasn't there any menagerie, or playground, or donkey-riding or bicyclers?