Of visitors to the pond, the least number on any one day was one hundred; the largest number on one day (Christmas) estimated at 100,000; aggregate niunber during the season, .540,000 ; average number on skating days, 12,000."

t This brief description was written, and the accompanying sketches were made, in 1861. Tlie great work of fashioning this Park, leaving Nature, in the growth of trees and shrubbery, to enrich and beautify it, is now (1866) nearly completed.

THE HUDSON.

But here, as everywhere else, on the upper part of Manhattan Island, the early footprints in the march of improvement are seen. As we leave the beautiful arrangement of the park, the eye immediately^ncounters scenes of perfect chaos, where animated and inanimated nature combine in making pictures upon memory, never to be forgotten. The opening and grading of new streets produce many rugged bluffs of earth and rock ; and upon these, whole villages of squatters, Avho arc chiefly Irish, may

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THE TKRRACE BUlllUE AND MJ

be seen. These inhabitants have the most supreme disregard for law or custom in planting their dwellings. To them the land seems to "lie out of doors," without visible owners, bare and unproductive. Without inquiry they take full possession, erect cheap cabins upon the "public domains," and exercise "squatter sovereignty" in an eminent degree, until some innovating owner disturbs their repose and their title, by

THE HUDSON.

undermining their castles -- for in New York, as in England, "every man's house is his castle." These form the advanced guard of the growing metropolis ; and so eccentric is Fortune in the distribution of her favours in this land of general equality, that a dweller in these "suburban cottages," -where swine and goats are seen instead of deer and blood-cattle, may, not many years in the future, occupy a palace upon Central Park -- perhaps, upon the very spot where he now uses a pig for a pillow, and breakfasts upon the milk of she-goatsL In a superb mansion of his own,