A photograph from the collection of J. Clarence Davies, reproduced in the book issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank, shows Grant's funeral procession climbing the slope of Murray Hill, August 8, 1885, and passing the residences of John Jacob Astor and William B. Astor, on the sites of which is the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel of the present. The house of John Jacob was at Thirty-third Street, and that of William B. at Thirty-fourth Street, and there was a garden between shut off from the Avenue by a ten-foot brick wall. The Waldorf, named after the little town of Waldorf, Germany, the ancestral home of the family, occupies the site of the John Jacob house, and was opened March 14, 1893. Four and a half years later, on November 1, 1897, the Astoria came formally into being, and the two hotels linked by the hyphen and merged under one management. That point where Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross is one of the great corners of New York. It is the one that made the profoundest impression on Arnold Bennett: "The pale-pillared, square structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a background of the lofty red of the AEolian Building, and the great white store on the opposite pavement." A city of amazement has been left behind. Here we are at the threshold of still another city. It is different at every hour of the day. But whether we see it in the sweet-scented dawn, or at high noon, or at the shopping hour, or later, when, to use Arnold Bennett's words, "the street lamps flicker into a steady, steely blue, and the windows of the hotels and restaurants throw a yellow radiance, and all the shops--especially the jewellers' shops--become enchanted treasure houses, whose interiors recede away behind their facades into infinity," it is ever the essence of our New York of Anno Domini 1918. Then, in an instant, the Hill of today vanishes. The show windows of the great shops, gorgeous with display, the vast hotels, the clubs, the fluttering Starry Banners and Tricolours and Union Jacks, the stirring posters that bring the heart into the throat and send the hand down into the pocket for Liberty Loan or Red Cross, the line of creeping motor-cars on the asphalt, the swarming sidewalks, swim away in a mist, and in their place there is rolling woodland, and a silver stream, and in the distance, a great white house. The years drop away. A boy of eight, curled up in a big chair, is dipping for the first time into the pages of his country's history. His face is flushed, his eyes are bright. With that vividness that belongs to impressionable childhood, and to no other period of life he is seeing bits of the past that he will never forget. To the end of his days the rhetorical phrases will ring in his ears and the letters forming them will dance before his eyes.