=NEW YORK TO ALBANY.=


=Desbrosses Street Pier to Forty-Second Street.=

Our historic journey fittingly begins at Desbrosses Street, for here,
near the old River-front, extending from Desbrosses along Greenwich,
stood the Revolutionary line of breastworks reaching south to the
Grenadier Battery at Franklin Street. Below this were "Jersey,"
"McDougall" and "Oyster" batteries and intervening earthworks to Port
George, on the Battery, which stood on the site of old Fort Amsterdam,
carrying us back to Knickerbocker memories of Peter Stuyvesant and
Wowter Van Twiller. The view from the after-deck, before the steamer
leaves the pier, gives scope for the imagination to re-picture the
far-away primitive and heroic days of early New York.

=Desbrosses Street Pier.=--On leaving the lower landing a charming
view is obtained of New York Harbor, the Narrows, Staten Island, the
Bartholdi Statue of Liberty, and, in clear weather, far away to the
South, the Highlands of Nevisink, the first land to greet the eye
of the ocean voyager. As the steamer swings out into the stream the
tourist is at once face to face with a rapidly changing panorama.
Steamers arriving, with happy faces on their decks, from southern
ports or distant lands; others with waving handkerchiefs bidding
good-bye to friends on crowded docks; swift-shuttled ferry-boats, with
hurrying passengers, supplying their homespun woof to the great warp
of foreign or coastwise commerce; noisy tug-boats, sombre as dray
horses, drawing long lines of canal boats, or proud in the convoy of
some Atlantic greyhound that has not yet slipped its leash; dignified
"Men of War" at anchor, flying the flags of many nations, happy