300,000 dollars. The primary object of the founder is the advancement of science, and knowledge of the useful arts, and to this end all the interior arrangements of the edifice were made. "When it was completed, Mr. Cooper formally conveyed the whole property to trustees, to be devoted to the public good.^' By his munificence, benevolence, and wisdom displayed in this gift to his countrymen, Mr. Cooper takes rank among the great benefactors of mankind.

Clinton Hall belongs to the Mercantile Library Association, which is composed chiefly of merchants and merchants' clerks. It has a membership of between four and five thousand persons, and a library of nearly seventy thousand volumes. The building was formerly the Astor Place Opera House, and in the open space around it occurred the memorable riot occasioned by the quarrel between Porrest and Macready, to which allusion has been made.

xS^car Astor Place, on Lafayette Place, is the Astor Library, created by the munificence of the American Croesus, John Jacob Astor, who bequeathed for the purpose 400,000 dollars. The building (made larger than at first designed, by the liberality of the son of the founder, and chief inheritor of his property) is capable of holding 200,000 volumes. More than half that number are there now. The building occupies a portion of the once celebrated Vauxhall Gardens, a place of amusement thirty years ago.

Let us now ride down the Bowery, the broadest street in the city, and lined almost wholly with small retail shops. It leads us to Franklin Square, a small triangular space at the junction of Pearl and Cherry Streets. This, in the " olden time," was the fashionable quarter of the city, and was remarkable first for the great "Walton House, and a little later as the vicinity of the residence of "Washington during the first year of his administration as first President of the United States.