An architect said to us: "New York has a wonderful skyline." He explained that the "skyline" is the silhouette that the buildings make against the sky. In some cities the buildings are so nearly one height that the skyline is level and uninteresting, but in New York there are tall sky-scrapers, low buildings, domes, towers, and smokestacks, so that the skyline is full of variety. The picture shows the skyline of lower New York as we saw it from Brooklyn Bridge, which is the oldest bridge connecting Brooklyn with Manhattan. It is over a mile long. The bridge was designed by John Roebling, but he died before it was begun. His son took his place, but he worked so hard planning and superintending the work that in three years he became an invalid. Then he took a house overlooking the bridge, and from his invalid chair he watched through a telescope and directed all the work till it was completed ten years later.
Not far from Brooklyn Bridge is the Stock Exchange, which is the most famous business building in New York. We never knew that tame men could act as wild as they do there. It is where they buy and sell stocks and of course they are all anxious to make as much money as possible and everyone seems to be gesturing and screaming and no one seems to be listening. It is as exciting as a football game.
After all the wild noises of the Stock Exchange, we went to the most quiet place in the city, Grant's Tomb. We thought it would look like a cemetery, but it is a beautiful white granite building high up above the Hudson. The inside of the building is finished in white marble and there are the great red porphyry tombs of General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife. People who have traveled across the sea say that Napoleon's Tomb is more showy, but we were satisfied with Grant's Tomb. Someway it made us proud of America and its heroes.
By this time the sun was setting behind the Palisades on the other side of the river, and those great cliffs looked like pictures of castles on the Rhine. The Hudson is far wider and more beautiful than the Rhine, though, which is another good reason for "seeing America first."
One of the finest parts of SEEING AMERICA FIRST is the trip around the Great Lakes. They are so large that people call them "inland seas," and when you are out of sight of land, it is just like being on the ocean. Our steamer was what grown-ups call "a floating palace," and we learned many interesting things as we went along.
We never saw so many kinds of boats before. Great barges full of iron and copper ore, small steamboats tugging a whole line of lazy big barges, fine sailing vessels looking exactly like picture-book ships, and little naptha launches that came out and played around our big steamer when she neared a port. The great whaleback steamers looked like angry sea monsters snorting smoke out of their high stacks, but they are really kindly creatures for they carry immense loads of wheat or ore from the Lake Superior region to the southern and eastern ports. Another kind of boat is known as a "rabbit," and the pictures on the opposite page show you these queer craft.
People had told us that Lake Superior is twenty feet higher than Lake Huron, and we boys were dreading the plunge which our steamer would have to make, but it was as quiet as a mill-pond, for our boat merely sailed into a sort of box or "lock" and the water was slowly lowered till we sailed out on Lake Huron without even a jolt. There are locks between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, too, for Niagara Falls would not be very easy for a steamer to climb or descend.
It is wonderful to watch the loading and unloading of the huge freight barges. There are great derricks which reach out giant arms and pick up monstrous loads and carry them up or down to deck or dock.