the largest, I believe, in the world:  it has upwards of one hundred and fifty feet frontage on Broadway, and runs back nearly the same distance:  is five stories high, besides the basement; its front is faced with white marble, and it contains nearly every marketable commodity except eatables.  If you want anything, in New York, except a dinner, go to Stewart’s, and it is ten to one you find it, and always of the newest kind and pattern; for this huge establishment clears out every year, and refills with everything of the newest and best.  Goods are annually sold here to the amount of upwards of a million sterling—­a sum which I should imagine was hardly exceeded by any establishment of a similar nature except Morison’s in London, which, I believe, averages one and a half million.  Some idea of the size of this store may be formed, from the fact that four hundred gas burners are required to light it up.  Mr. Stewart, I was informed, was educated for a more intellectual career than the keeper of a store, on however grand a scale; but circumstances induced him to change his pursuits, and as he started with scarce any capital, the success which has attended him in business cannot but make one regret that the world has lost the benefit which might have been anticipated from the same energy and ability, if it had been applied to subjects of a higher class.

I will now offer a few observations on the state of the streets.  The assertion has been made by some writer—­I really know not who—­that New York is one of the dirtiest places in the world.  To this I must give a most unqualified denial.  No person conversant with many of the large provincial towns in England and Scotland, can conscientiously “throw a very large stone” at New York; for though much is doing among us to improve and sweeten—­chiefly, thanks to the scourge of epidemics—­I fear that in too many places we are still on this point “living in glass houses.”  Doubtless, New York is infinitely dirtier than London, as London at present is far less clean than Paris has become under the rule of the Third Napoleon.  I fully admit that it is not so clean as it should be, considering that the sum nominally spent on cleansing the streets amounts to very nearly sixty thousand pounds a year, a sum equal to one pound for every ten inhabitants; but the solution of this problem must be looked for in the system of election to the corporation offices, on which topic I propose to make a few observations in some future portion of these pages.  While on the subject of streets, I cannot help remarking that it always struck me as very curious that so intelligent a people as the Americans never adopted the simple plan of using sweeping carts, which many of their countrymen must have seen working in London.  If not thoroughly efficient, their ingenuity might have made them so; and, at all events, they effect a great saving of human labour.  But there is a nuisance in the streets of New York, especially in