Not far from the beginning of the century, Wall Street, as its name implies, was the northern boundary of the city of New York. The present north boundary of civilized settlement is almost identical with the statutory limit of the city, or that of the island itself. There is no perceptible break, though there are gradations of compactness, in the settled district between the foot of the island and Central Park. Beyond the Park, Haarlem Lane, Manhattanville, and Carmansville take up the thread of civic population, and carry it, among metropolitan houses and lamp-posts, quite to the butment of High Bridge. It has been seriously proposed to legislate for the annexation of a portion of Westchester to the bills of mortality, and this measure cannot fail to be demanded by the next generation; but for the present we will consider High Bridge as the north end of the city. Let us compare the boundary remembered by our veterans with that to which metropolitan settlement has been pushed by them and their children. In the lifetime of our oldest business-men, the advance wave of civic refinement, convenience, luxury, and population has travelled a distance greater than that from the Westminster Palaces to the hulks at the Isle of Dogs. When we consider that the population of the American Metropolis lives better, on the average, than that of any earthly capital, and that ninety-nine hundredths of all our suffering poor are the overflow of Great Britain's pauperism running into our grand channels a little faster than we can direct its current to the best advantage,--under these circumstances the advance made by New York in less than a century toward the position of the world's metropolis is a more important one than has been gained by London between the time of Julius Caesar and the present century. I know an excellent business-man who was born in his father's aristocratic residence in Beaver Street. Holborn is as aristocratic now. Another friend of mine still living, the freshest of sexagenarians, told me lately of a walk he took in boyhood which so much fatigued him, that, when he was a long way out in the fields, he sat down to rest on the steps of a suburban hospital. I guessed Bellevue; but he replied that it was the New York Hospital, standing in what we now call the lower part of Broadway, just opposite North Pearl Street. No part of the Strand or of the Boulevards is less rural than the vast settled district about the New York Hospital at this day. It stands at least four times farther within than it then did beyond the circumference of New York civilization. I remember another illustration of its relative situation early in the century,--a story of good old Doctor Stone, who excused himself from his position of manager by saying, that, as the infirmities of age grew on him, he found the New York Hospital so far out in the country that he should be obliged, if he stayed, to keep "a horse and _cheer_."