are along here, where once the water came before the city outgrew its clothes; before Water Street, now two or three blocks back, had lost all right to its name. Here the big slanting bowsprits hunch away in over South Street as if trying to be quits with the land for its encroachment, and the plain old brick buildings huddled together across the way have no cornices for fear of their being poked off. Queer old buildings they are, sail lofts with their peculiar roofs, and sailors' lodging-houses, and the shops where the seaman can buy everything he needs from suspenders to anchor cables, so that after a ten-thousand mile cruise he can spend all his several months' pay within two blocks of where he first puts foot on shore and within one night from when he does so. Very often he has not energy to go farther or money to buy anything, thanks to the slavery system which conducts the sailors' lodging-houses across the way. There is nothing very picturesque about our modern merchant marine and its ill-used and over-worked sailors; it is only pathetic.

Those are some of the reasons, I think, why East River is more interesting to most of us than North River. Another reason, perhaps, is that East River is not a river at all, but an arm of the ocean which makes Long Island, and true to its nature in spite of man's error it holds the charm of the sea. The North River side of the town in the old days had less to do with the business of those who go down to the sea in ships, was more rural and residential; and now its water-front is so jammed with railway ferry-houses and ocean-steamship docks that there is little room for anything else.

For the little scenes ... quaint and lovable, one goes down along the South Street water-front.

Smacks and oyster-floats near Fulton Market. (At the foot of Beekman Street, East River.)

However, these long, roofed docks of famous Cunarders and American and White Star Liners, and of the French steamers (which have a round-roof dock of a sort all their own) are interesting in their way, too, and the names of the foreign ports at the open entrance cause a strange fret to be up and going; especially on certain days of the week when thick smoke begins to pour from the great funnels which stick out so enormously above the top story of the now noisy piers. Cabs and carriages with coachmen almost hidden by trunks and steamer-rugs crowd in through the dock-gates, while, within, the hold baggage-derricks are rattling and there is an excited chatter of good-by talk....

By the time you get up to Gansevoort Market, with its broad expanse of cobble-stones, the steamship lines begin to thin out and the ferries are now sprinkled more sparsely. Where the avenues grow out into their teens, there are coal-yards and lumber-yards. On the warehouses and factories are great twenty-foot letters advertising soap and cereals, all of which are the best.... Farther up is the region of slaughter-houses and their smells, gas-houses and their smells.... And so on up to Riverside, and across the new bridge to the unknown wildness of Manhattan's farthest north, and Fort Washington with its breastworks, which, it is pleasing to see, are being visited and picnicked upon more often than formerly.

This is the tired city's playground.

Washington Bridge and the Speedway—Harlem River looking south.

But over on the east edge of the town there is more to look at and more of a variety. All the way from the Bridge and the big white battle-ships squatting in the Navy Yard across the river; up past Kip's Bay with its dapper steam-yachts waiting to take their owners home from business; past Bellevue Hospital and its Morgue, past Thirty-fourth Street ferry with its streams of funerals and fishing-parties; Blackwell's Island with its green grass and the young doctors playing tennis, oblivious to their surroundings; Hell Gate with its boiling tide, where so many are drowned every year; East River Park with its bit of green turf (it is too bad there are not more of these parks on our water-fronts); past Ward's Island with its public institutions; Randall's Island with more public institutions—and so, up into the Harlem, where soon, around the bend, the occasional tall mast looks very incongruous when seen across a stretch of real estate.

And now you have a totally different feel in the air and a totally different sort of "scenery." It is as different as the use it is put to. Below McComb's Dam Bridge, clear to the Battery, it was nearly all work; up here it is nearly all play.

On the banks of the river, rowing clubs, yacht clubs, bathing pavilions—they bump into each other, they are so thick; on the water itself their members and their contents bump into each other on holidays—launches, barges, racing-shells and all sorts of small pleasure craft.

Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.

(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.)

Near the Manhattan end of McComb's Dam Bridge are the two fields famous for football victories, baseball championships, track games, open-air horse shows; across the bridge go the bicyclers and automobilists, hordes of them, brazen-braided bicyclists who use chewing-gum and lean far over, leather coated chauffeurs with their eyes unnecessarily protected.