Cox's and Wyman's and Gulick's administrations. It was cherished by the firemen, and, upon the destruction of the Bridewell, the old bell was placed in the cupola of the Naiad Hose Company, Beaver Street, and was still devoted to its long-established uses. But the great fire of '45 swept away this building, with its venerable bell; and the faithful old public sentinel, sounding its last alarm, suc

BARNUM'S MUSEUM AND ST. PAUL'S CHURCH.

cumbed to the flaming foe against which it had so many years successfully warned the citizens.

Many fires have occurred since the one of 1845. The Crystal Palace (1858), Barnum's Museum (1865), Harper's Building (1853), the old Irving House and the Academy of Music (1866), and the Winter Garden Theater (1867), have fallen before the destroyer-each involving

heavy losses; but the city has never since been visited by such wholesale destruction of property; and it is fervently to be hoped that New York, protected by its present efficient Fire Department, has experienced the last of similar calamities.

Indeed, with the exception of Constantinople, New York has, perhaps, suffered more frequently from conflagrations than any other city in the world. Hamilton said in his time that one could not be twenty-four hours in New York without hearing an alarm of fire. This observation was repeated by a writer who published a small work, in 1837, called A Glance at New York, who added that one alarm a day would be a small average, and that it would be nearer the truth to say that the firemen of New York were called out five hundred times a yeara statement which all familiar with New York at that time, and for years before it, can corroborate. Many of these, undoubtedly, were false alarms, raised by boys for the pleasure of running after the fire-engines. We have had no fire of the magnitude of that of London in 1666, which laid waste four hundred and thirty-six acres, destroyed eighty-nine churches, thirteen thousand two hundred houses, and left two hundred thousand people temporarily without homes; nor like the fire in Hamburg, in 1842, which burned down sixty-one streets and one thousand seven hundred and forty-seven houses; nor like the Chicago fire, which burned over five acres, and left one hundred thousand of her citizens houseless. But if the frequency of fires in the city, the magnitude of some of them, and the amount of property destroyed, be collectively considered, it will be seen that New York, perhaps, has suffered more heavily from this kind of calamity than any other city of modern times.

Still, it must be admitted that, as a general thing, all of the conflagrations, both general and individual, with

which New York has been visited, have in the end proved of great benefit, by causing more spacious and elegant edifices to arise, phoenix-like, out of the ashes. Perhaps in no other city of either hemisphere is there such a number of magnificent public and private edifices. Take Fifth Avenue, for example, which, although at present the chief of the fashionable promenades, is by no means the only handsome thoroughfare. For a distance of

FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL, MADISON SQUARE.

more than two miles one may pass between houses of the most costly description, built chiefly of brown freestone, some of it elaborately carved. Travelers agree that in no other city in the world can there be found an equal number of really splendid mansions in a single street. At Madison Square, between Twenty-third and Twentysixth Streets, it is crossed diagonally by Broadway. At

the intersection, and fronting Madison Park, is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, built of white marble, and said to be one of the largest and most elegant buildings of the kind in the world.

It is therefore, not a little singular that New York, with her traditions and memories, should have so few

public monuments. True, there are a number of statues; such, for example, as those of Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin, erected successively in 1856, 1870, and 1872; but it is a literal fact that, with the exception of the mural one to the memory of General Montgomery, in the front wall of St. Paul's, and the soldiers' monument in Trinity church-yard, the only public monument that