Private houses of historic interest abounded not many years ago, notable among them the country-seat called Richmond Hill, near the long since absorbed village of Greenwich—a stately dwelling, identified with many familiar names. John Adams lived there during a part of his first term as Vice-President, and Aaron Burr started thence on that fateful July morning in 1804 that saw the death of Hamilton at his hand, and the end of his own political career. Of equal note was the house on Murray Hill, where Mrs. Murray detained the British commander at lunch while the American troops, under Putnam, made their escape from the island in 1776. [Illustration: GRANT’S TOMB, RIVERSIDE DRIVE.] The so-called Jumel Mansion, built for Washington’s whilom flame, Miss Mary Philippse, by her successful suitor, Col. Roger Morris, and afterwards occupied by Washington as his headquarters, became in turn the property of the nation (Morris having been a royalist), of John Jacob Astor, and of Stephen Jumel, whose erratic widow married Aaron Burr, but soon tired of him, turned him out of doors and dropped his name. From its coign of vantage on Harlem Heights at 169th Street, this dignified colonial dwelling still looks down upon the Harlem River and across to Long Island Sound. And at the foot of East 61st Street is yet to be seen—vine-covered, and embowered in trees and shrubs—the substantial stone residence of Col. William Smith, who married the daughter of President Adams, and ruined himself by speculating in east-side real estate. But the scarcity of such relics, and their glaring incongruity with their surroundings, emphasize the divergence between the old New York and that which is termed the Greater. In the hall of Cooper Institute, Abraham Lincoln made that great speech which first fully revealed him to the people of the Eastern States; and hither he was brought, to lie in state in the City Hall, when a martyr’s death had disclosed his greatness still more clearly to all his countrymen.