OF JVEW  YORK CITY.                     363

dent of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Com¬
pany until he died, in 1846. He was forty-six years of
age. The elder Tow-nsend was probably the principal
capitalist of the house of Hicks, Lawrence & Co., whe'i
it first started
 

CHAPTER XLL

Passing along slowly to the grave, having traveled
eighty or ninety years, we meet every now and then
venerable men, who were men of raark in this town
sixty or sixty-five years ago. Some, even before
Washington died.

As we recognize thesn in the street, we involuntarily
pause, in respectful attitude, and carefully mark their
strange, shy look, acting as if strangers, or as if sud¬
denly transferred to Pekin, or the city of the great
Mogul, seeming to have forgotten the fact that they
were once men of renown here. These very men can
hardly realize that their city and its suburbs has grown
from 28,000 to over a million of population !

Twenty-three thousand ! Why, one can live among
23,000 people, and know alraost everybody, even down
to the little children, and be known to thera, as you
take your walk down to the Battery, in 1786 — and
that was only seventy-five years ago! The raan we
have in our mind's eye now was a man with an eagle
eye and majestic presence three quarters of a century
ago, and the eye has not dimmed yet.

" An old merchant ? " ask our regular readers. No
— not exactly; and yet so closely alhed has he been
with -them, that I must allude to him.    Sometimes I