Manhattan island is about fourteen miles long, with an average breadth of one mile and a half, the greatest width being two and a half miles. At the southerly point of the island, where the Hudson unites with the strait called the East River, lies one of the finest harbors in the world, affording anchorage for ships of the largest size, and surrounded by cultivated land and elegant residences. Several fortified islands diversify this bay, and numerous forts occupy the points and headlands on either side. The general appearance of the bay is that of great beauty, of the milder sort. The shores are rather low, but finely wooded, and the approach to the city from the ocean very striking. The battery, a promenade covered with fine old trees, offers a rural front, but the forests of masts stretching far up either river attract the stranger's attention much more forcibly. The _coup d'oeil_ is here magnificent. Brooklyn, on Long Island, a large city, whose white columned streets gleam along the heights, giving a palatial grandeur to the view, is just opposite New-York, on the south-east, and divided from it by so narrow a strait that it appears more truly to be a part of it than the Surrey side of the Thames to belong to London, although the rush of commerce forbids bridges. On the west side, the banks of the Hudson are lined with towns, an outcrop of the central metropolis. Entering the city from any quarter, we are sure to find ourselves in Broadway, long the pride of the inhabitants, though its glories are rather traditional than actual, as compared with the greatest thoroughfares of commerce in older cities. It extends, eighty feet in width, two miles and a half in a straight line, northward from the Battery; and then, making a slight deflection at Union Park, runs on, _ad infinitum_, though it is at present but sparely built after another mile or so. Nearly all the best shops in the retail trade are in this street, some of them comparable to the richest of London and Paris, and the whole affording means for every device of elegant decoration and boundless expenditure. Residences here are comparatively few, especially in the lower part, the din of business and the ceaseless thunder of omnibuses having driven far away every family that has the liberty of choice. Many churches still exist in Broadway, which, on Sunday, is as quiet as any other street. Other architectural decorations there are few. The City Hall, a costly building of white marble, too long and low to make a dignified appearance, but standing in a well-wooded park, of some eleven or twelve acres in extent, has a certain beauty, especially when seen gleaming through the spray of a fountain, which sends up a tall jet at some distance in front of the building. Farther on is a hospital, of rather ancient date for this western world--built in 1775, and now surrounded by venerable trees, and clothed in the richest ivy. After