The sailor ashore in New York—and how many, many thousands visit it every year!—will find much to note. The public buildings of the great city are not remarkable; but the one great street, Broadway, which is about eight miles long, and almost straight, is a very special feature. Unceasing throngs of busy men and women, loungers and idlers, vehicles of all kinds, street cars, omnibuses, and carriages—there are no cabs hardly in New York—pass and re-pass from early morn to dewy eve, while the shops, always called “stores,” rival those of the Boulevards or Regent Street. Some of the older streets were, no doubt, as Washington Irving tells us, laid out after the old cow-paths, as they are as narrow and tortuous as those of any European city. The crowded state of Broadway at certain points rivals Cheapside. The writer saw in 1867 a light bridge, which spanned the street, and was intended for the use of ladies and timid pedestrians. When, in 1869, he re-passed through the city it had disappeared, and on inquiry he learnt the reason. Unprincipled roughs had stationed themselves at either end, and levied black-mail toll on old ladies and unsophisticated country-people. So extreme is the difference between the intense heat of summer and the equally intense cold of winter in New York, that the residents regularly get thin in the former and stout in the latter. And what a sight are the two rivers at that time! Huge masses of ice, crashing among themselves, and making navigation perilous and sometimes impossible, descending the stream at a rapid rate; docks and slips frozen in; the riggings and shrouds of great ships covered with icicles, and the decks ready for immediate use as skating-rinks. The writer crossed in the ferry-boat from Jersey City to New York, in January, 1875, and acquired a sincere respect for the pilot, who wriggled and zig-zagged his vessel through masses of ice, against which a sharp collision would not have been a joke. When, on the following morning, he left for Liverpool, the steamship herself was a good model for a twelfth-night cake ornament, and had quite enough to do to get out from the wharf. Five days after, in mid-Atlantic, he was sitting on deck in the open air, reading a book, so much milder at such times is it on the open ocean. [Illustration: BROOKLYN BRIDGE.]