Astride of Chamber Street at Park Row stands the Municipal Building. Under its roof are half a hundred commissions, departments, boards and bureaux that regulate such petty affairs as the highways, parks, water supply, bridges, taxes and fire-fighting for upwards of six millions of people. A gigantic task, and accomplished in a building well worthy of its responsibility. [Illustration] XII NEW YORK FROM FULTON FERRY Watching Manhattan as the boat comes near its shore, one seems to come under the spell of its incalculable weight, its stupendous mass of iron, brick and stone. It is oppressive, ominous. One feels the past, the present and the future; and the tremendous forces which must have worked together to produce this titanic offspring, to have spawned this mountain of precipices. One feels the hidden activity, the pitiless struggle going on beneath; yet a few puffs of smoke are all that betray the smouldering of the mighty fires. One lets one’s mind sink into the vast depths between, to see little humanity running here and there like ants amid the tangle of wires, tunnels and pipes. Little humanity that built it all. In the past, church spires rose majestic above the surrounding city. Now they are lost. The buildings of commerce, creeping high and higher, have struggled upward, climbing upon one another’s backs, and mounting each on the shoulder of each, in their ceaseless effort to be the tallest among their fellows. And just as it is among men and the rulers of men, as surely as one has gained the supremacy, has come another to surpass him, swinging upward yet another fifty, one hundred, or two hundred feet, and from their thousand brazen throats has boomed again the cry, “Long live the king!” Eight hundred feet towers the monarch of to-day. He is called “Woolworth,” and twelve thousand men live daily in his strength. His head is of gold but his feet are of clay, and who will be king to-morrow? And wondering, one looks up and up, above the mightiest of these kings, and yet above the very summit of his crown, and there one sees--the sunset. [Illustration] XIII THE METROPOLITAN TOWER