Now the Equitable Building covers the place where Damen sat on his stocp and enjoyed his garden and listened to the hum of bees in the apple blossoms, -- covers house, garden, orchard, and all, to the extent of nearly an acre of grotmd. The old Middle Dutch Church in time disappeared from Nassau Street, as even churches do in New York, and on the i8th of October, 1882, the Mutual Life Insurance Company purchased the site for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. There is not one of the great buildings that tower

36 The Hudson River

even above the ordinar}- chimneys of the cit}', and challenge the eye of the traveller upon the river, that has not sunk its foundations deep into the associations of an historic past. Beneath and within the looming walls are traditions and memories; the tragedies, the romances, and the comedies of that older day.

Every year, the "tale of bricks is doubled" in Manhattan, and the huge buildings that stretch from the Battery northward multiply. In all that vast collection of iron and masonry there are a few individual masses that are symmetrical, but these are lost in the great aggregation. Separate structures have been shot into the air as though impelled by some terrific volcanic agency, but there is no hint of any idea of relationship between them; they suggest rather the accidental huddlins: of more or less unrelated and even incon-

New Buildino-s and Old n gruous elements. The saw-tooth sky-hne thus produced does not add an element of beauty to the aspect of the city as seen from the ri\'er: on the contrary, the ragged, irregular procession of domes, pyramids, cones, spires, and bricks-on-end give an impression of wealth, power, aggressiveness, -- of almost an^-thing under heaven except taste and relationship.