Tompkins, the latter having been a Governor of New York and Vice-President of the United States. On the island is the little red sandstone Fort Lafayette, where many famous political prisoners were confined during the Civil War. Within the Narrows the upper bay spreads out, the high Staten Island hills, covered with noble mansions, rising on the left hand, while on the right are the hamlets on the lower shores of Long Island, with the distant tombs of Greenwood Cemetery behind. The villages of Clifton and Stapleton and the Quarantine Station are on Staten Island, Stapleton being the yachting headquarters. Bedloe's and Ellis's Islands are passed, the latter being the landing-place of arriving emigrants, while on the former, now called Liberty Island, is the colossal Liberty Statue presented to the United States by France in commemoration of the Centenary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876. This statue, designed by Bartholdi and erected ten years later, is a female figure holding aloft a torch--"Liberty enlightening the world." It is made of copper and iron, and weighs two hundred and twenty-five tons. The statue is one hundred and fifty-one feet high, and stands on a granite pedestal one hundred and fifty-five feet high. Over on the western side, behind these small islands, the Jersey shore recedes, and the strait making the boundary of Staten Island, which the Dutch named the Kill von Kull, stretches around behind that island to Arthur Kill and sundry railway coal-shipping ports on its banks, where the great coal roads come out from the Pennsylvania mines. Just in the entrance to East River is Governor's Island, with an old-fashioned circular stone fort, called Castle William, and the more modern defensive work, Fort Columbus. On Governor's Island is the United States Army headquarters. This old Castle William, with another very similar circular fort, then called Castle Clinton, on the Battery at the lower end of Manhattan Island, were the defensive works of New York in the eighteenth century. Castle Clinton is now an aquarium. Red Hook, the jutting point of Brooklyn, is opposite Governor's Island, and above it the East River opens, the strait flowing between New York and Brooklyn, and connecting the harbor with Long Island Sound, twenty miles distant, beyond the famous "Hell Gate," once the terror of the mariner, but since improved by costly rock excavations which have made a deep and safe channel. Through the East River and Hell Gate flows the greater part of the Hudson River tidal current. Both the East and North Rivers are lined on either side for miles by piers crowded with shipping, and the tall towers and ponderous cables of the Brooklyn Bridge rise high above the East River, while behind the foliage-covered Battery Park stretches the metropolis, with its many huge buildings. JERSEY CITY AND STATEN ISLAND.