Northward from Madison Square the great street stretches up the aristocratic grade of Murray Hill, with its rows of stately buildings. Parallel and a short distance eastward is Madison Avenue, also a street of fashionable residence, and second only to Fifth Avenue in grandeur. At Twenty-ninth Street is the plain and substantial granite Dutch Reformed Church, and to the eastward is an odd-looking little church that has attained a wide reputation. It is a picturesque aggregation of low brick buildings, set back in a small enclosure between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and looking like a quaint mediæval structure. Some years ago a pompous rector, when asked to read the last prayers over the dead body of an actor, sent the sorrowing friends to this church, saying he could not thus pray for the ungodly, but they might be willing to do it at the little church around the corner. The public quickly caught on, through newspaper aid, and the result was that this attractive Church of the Transfiguration performed the last rites in presence of an overflowing congregation, and its official title has since been overshadowed by the popular one of "the Little Church Around the Corner." It is much attended by the theatrical fraternity, and contains a handsome memorial window to Edwin Booth. Mounting the gentle grade of Murray Hill, we come to Thirty-fourth Street, the locality typifying the two greatest fortunes amassed in America before the advent of the Vanderbilts. The whole block between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets is occupied by the towering Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, built of brick and sandstone in German Renaissance, and occupying the land originally the home of the Astors, while across Thirty-fourth Street is the white marble Stewart palace. The ancestor of the Astor family, John Jacob Astor, accumulated the largest fortune known in this country before the Civil War, his estates representing the early growth of New York, and the wealth coming from the advancing value of land as the city expanded. He was a poor German peasant-boy who came from the village of Waldorf, near Heidelberg, to London, and worked there prior to 1783, making musical instruments for his brother. In that year, at the age of about twenty, he sailed for America with $500 worth of instruments, meeting a furrier on the ship, who suggested that he trade the instruments for American furs. This he did in New York, and returning to London, sold the furs at a large profit. Coming back to New York, he established a fur-trade with England, and built ships for his business. He prospered, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century was worth $250,000. Then he began buying land and houses in New York, built many buildings, and was so shrewd in real-estate investments that they often increased a hundredfold. He was liberal and charitable, and dying in 1848, his estate, then the largest in the country, was estimated at $25,000,000. His chief public benefaction was the Astor