Library, which his son, William B. Astor, also aided, so that besides the buildings it has an endowment of about $1,800,000. The great Astor estates, now represented by the fourth generation, are estimated at over $200,000,000. The splendid palace at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street was built by Alexander T. Stewart when at the height of his fame as the leading New York merchant. Intended to eclipse anything then known in New York, he expended $3,000,000 upon the building and its decoration, so that this house outshone all other New York residences until the Vanderbilt palaces were erected farther out Fifth Avenue. Its latest occupant has been the Manhattan Club. Stewart's fortune was accumulated through the facilities at New York for successful trading, though much of his wealth was afterwards invested in large buildings in profitable business localities, and notably in great hotels. Stewart, like Astor, began his career with almost nothing, but at a later period. He was born at Belfast, Ireland, in 1802, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, but before taking his degree migrated to New York as a teacher in 1818. He got into the dry-goods trade in a small way near the City Hall Park, and his business grew until he acquired all the adjacent buildings, and put up the store at Chambers Street, and afterwards the retail store farther up Broadway. Enlarging in every direction, his business became the greatest in the country, with branches in the leading cities. He was an extensive importer, and owned various factories making the fabrics he sold. His business methods were profitable but unpopular, involving the remorseless crushing of rivals, so that he had few friends and many enemies. Yet he was charitable, sending a shipload of provisions to relieve the Irish famine in 1846, and he made large public gifts to aid suffering. When he died he was building on Fourth Avenue an enormous structure intended as a "Home for Working Girls," on which $1,400,000 were expended. It was opened soon after his death, but with such stringent regulations that a rebellion soon arose among the intended beneficiaries, and it had to be closed. There was a shrewd suspicion that the difficulty came by design, for the building was soon reopened as a hotel. Stewart had scarcely moved into his marble palace when he died, his body being put temporarily into a vault in the churchyard of old "St. Mark's Church in the Bowerie," awaiting removal to the magnificent mausoleum preparing for it at Garden City, Long Island. Then came the horrible news that the corpse had been stolen to avenge business tyranny. The childless widow lived in gloomy grandeur in the palace until her death, rarely seeing visitors, and having watchmen pacing the sidewalk at all hours. Stewart left no direct descendants, and his great business has gone, like his estate, to strangers. THE VANDERBILTS.