were dragged by mules or horses up to Fourth avenue and Twenty-sixth street, where the locomotive replaced the teams as a motor. As the town grew the railroad removed its station to the site of the present Madison Square Garden building, and converted the old depot into a freight-house, in and out of which lines of cars drawn by long tandems of mules clanked day and night the year round. Now the freight depot is gone, and an enormous granite structure, which accommodates the various criminal courts, rises on its site. Between this building and the Tombs an enclosed bridge for the passage of prisoners to and from court spans the street. The Tombs itself was built in the basin of a little lake which was once one of the romantic spots of Manhattan Island, and a favorite resort of the angler and the pleasure seeker. The lake was known as the Collect Pond, a corruption of the Dutch title "Kalckhoek," or Shell Point, from a beach of shells which existed on its margin. The Collect was a fresh-water pond, fed by natural springs, and having an outlet by small streams into both the North and East rivers. Thus the pond and its creeks actually cut Manhattan Island in half and made two islands of it. There were pleasure houses on the hillocks around the Collect, and on an island, in its centre, the city powder house was erected. The course of time worked the usual changes upon it for the worse. Tanners set up their tan pits near it, the city garbage was dumped into it, and among the marshes to the eastward the criminal colony, since infamous as the Five Points, commenced to form itself. There was still water enough in it in 1796 for John Fitch to experiment in navigating the first steamboat America ever saw, but a few years later, to give employment to clamorous and starving labor, at a period of industrial and commercial stagnation, the city ordered the hills around it to be leveled and the pond filled up with the earth removed from them. In spite of the reduction of the ground to the westward, the site remained much lower than the grade of Broadway, and the Tombs roof is scarcely above the line of that thoroughfare. To support the ponderous mass of Maine granite, which constituted the prison, a forest of piles was sunk deep in the sodden soil. The work of construction occupied five years, so that the prison had been in use scarcely four years when Dickens made his visit to it--and, while its outer walls remain substantially the same, its internal construction has been vastly augmented and improved. When he saw it the city watch-house occupied part of the building; and he makes a record of a night visit to "those black sties" where "men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapors which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench." The watch-house was on the Franklin street side of the jail, and was long kept up as a police station.