Of music, vocal and instrumental, such feasts are spread before the local amateur as can be matched for quality and abundance in no other city at home or abroad, and while this is not true of the drama also, as the Comédie Française has never come hither in a body, it is yet a fact that nearly all that is best is seen, sooner or later, on the New York stage. By what rapid strides the city is moving forward in some directions, while halting lamentably in others, needs not to be pointed out. There is expert testimony to the effect that in public morality it has at least held its own during the past half-century; we trust it may some day work out its salvation in things political, and cease to be the mild milch cow of thirsty demagogues. It can never vie in picturesqueness and historic interest with its European peers in population and importance, nor atone by its singularly fortunate situation for its poverty in little parks and its richness in rough-paved, right-angled and treeless streets and avenues; yet it may some day rival even Paris in the absolute beauty of its public and private buildings and historic monuments. A brave beginning has been made, in the Washington Arch, the Madison Square Garden, the Columbia and the New York University buildings, the Washington, Hale and Farragut statues and certain churches, club-houses and private dwellings. And in the Cathedral of St. John, the Public Library, the Academy of Design and the Botanical and Zoölogical gardens, a further stride will be made erelong in the only directions in which æsthetic leadership seems possible. [Illustration] BROOKLYN THE TOWN ON FREEDOM’S BATTLE-FIELD BY HARRINGTON PUTNAM The earliest Dutch settlements within the present borough limits are not so old as the first hamlets on Manhattan. More than a score of years after the houses and forts of New Amsterdam looked out across the East River, the forest-crested heights of the west end of Long Island remained in undisturbed Indian occupation.