Thus can we record the transformation of a community. It is a transformation which has created many problems, far too many to be recounted here. We have only room to show the nature of the change to a town where grandfathers used to be all in all and which has sleepily awakened to find itself cosmopolitan, its institutions changing, its future uncertain. There have not been a dozen important Protestant churches builded in Brooklyn within the past twelve years--and some of these merely new edifices for old congregations which have been forced to pick up and move. And there have been old churches of old faiths that finally have had to give up and close their doors for the final time. Even the old custom of singing Christmas songs in the public schools has been forbidden. The New England strain of Americanism in Brooklyn is dying. * * * * * Brooklyn today has no theater of wide reputation, although in Greenwood she has what is deservedly the most famous cemetery in America. Hold on, Brooklyn may have no theater, but she has a town-hall and a town-hall that is worthy of mention here. They do not call it the town-hall or the opera-house, but it is known as the Academy of Music and it is an institution well worth the while of any town. And the Brooklyn Academy of Music is the rallying or focal point for so much that stands for good within the community that we must see how it has come into being. It seems that when Brooklyn men and women of today were Brooklyn boys and girls there stood down on Montague street in the oldest part of the town an elder Academy of Music and to it they were taken on certain great occasions to hear a splendid lecture with magic-lantern pictures, the Swiss Bell Ringers, or perhaps even real drama or real opera, although play-acting was frowned upon in the early days of that barn-like structure. Eventually, its directors capitulated entirely. Times were changing. So it was that Brooklyn saw the great actors and the great singers of yesterday upon the stage of its old Academy; from that stage it heard its own preachers, heard such orators as Edward Everett and John B. Gough; crowded into the spacious auditorium at the Commencement exercises and the amateur dramatics of its boys and girls. The old Academy was a part of the social fabric of old Brooklyn.