Watching the innocents for a moment, we hurried away, feeling that the New York Cooking School is an institution worthy of good people's patronage and praise, not only for its sending out young housekeepers educated in the economic principles of cookery, but because of the grand work it is doing in a baking-pan with hot water surround- | their little pails like so many doves in a ing them. The little girl then cautiously dovecote pecking corn. slid the pan into the oven, her face aglow with pride in the safe performance of her task. Meanwhile the third little damsel had chopped her parsley, mixed it with an ounce of butter, a tea-spoonful of lemon juice, and a little salt and pepper, after which she retired to her seat, and another small child came forward to drop the fillets in the smoking lard, All the class waited for the lemon custards, casting in teaching troubled glances at the clock. As they the children were slowly drawn forth from the oven of the poorer and placed upon the table, the lesson classes. concluded, the children crowded around to taste and receive their shares of the finished results of the lesson. Little tin pails popped up mysteriously to receive. the well-earned dainties. Hats and shawls were hastily donned, the little ones hurried out of doors, and pausing on the pavement, cooed and fluttered with satisfaction over the contents of CHILDREN GOING HOME. THE CITY OF ATLANTA. TLANTA, the present metropolis of Georgia, has had a history peculiar for a Southern town. Those who have spoken of the city as the "Chicago of the South," appear to have struck not very wide of the mark. Forty years ago there was nothing at all here. Maps of the period, very minute and careful in their topography, show no such place. All the wagon roads centred at Decatur, at Marietta, and at Canton. Creeks and Cherokees occupied the whole region, and there was hardly even a cross-roads at this point. The turnpike between Georgia and Tennessee did not pass through it, and no large river furnished facilities for navigation, or offered power to move machinery. How, then, did Atlanta come to exist at all; and, much more, how did she succeed, like the goddess whose name she suggests, in outstripping all her older sisters, Augusta, Savannah, Macon, and the rest? than by the natural course of events. It is an interesting and exceptional example of prosperity ensuing from forced conditions, and came about in this wise: When the experiment of steam locomotion had proved a success in England, and was being introduced on this side of the Atlantic, Georgians were quick to perceive that they needed this new invention, and as early as 1833 charters were granted to several interior railway companies. It was also seen that the State required railway communication with the West and Northwest, in the shape of a trunk line, in the advantages of which all the interior roads could share. The Legislature was therefore consulted, and in 1835 an act was approved authorizing the construction of a railway from the Tennessee line, near the Tennessee River, to the southwestern bank of the Chattahoochee River, "at a point most eligible for the running of branch roads thence to Athens, Madison, Milledgeville, Forsyth, and Columbus." A survey was made accord The answer is found in one word-rail-ingly, and it was found that at this point, ways. 66 Atlanta is a fiat" town, and was put where she is by act of Legislature rather seven miles east of the Chattahoochee, spurs of the Blue Ridge intersected in such a manner that a natural centre oc curred for all the most likely routes of railway communication then surveyed or likely to be laid out. Here, then, right out in the woods, it was resolved to begin the "State" railway north to the Tennessee line, and the spot naturally came to be known as "Terminus." He Passengers on the Air Line road to Washington will remember a little breakfast station called Central, up in the mountains of Western South Carolina. As the train comes round the bend of the hill, and slows up, a dinner-bell is heard, and the eye takes in a white building, with a long cool piazza, where stands a man whose genial smiling face and fat throat, whose generous amplitude of waist and solid support of legs, augur well for the fare that awaits within. rings the bell steadily with one hand, and with the other busily welcomes the passengers as though they were all old friends. Then how urgently he presses upon you a choice of good things! how distressed he is if you do not eat as heartily as he thinks you ought! how solicitous to assure you that there is time enough! and with what benignity, mildly protesting against the necessity, does he take your fifty cents! Do you wonder that he is known from one end of the Cotton States to the other, and that everybody loves "Cousin John" Thrasher? The path to a man's heart lies through his stomach, it is said, and this generous, easy-natured caterer has secured the right of way in this part of the world. Well, the point of this digression is that "Cousin John" is the original oldest inhabitant of Atlanta, because in 1839 he came here and built the first house. Soon after, other families settled at Terminus, and Mr. Thrasher opened a store; but he had little faith in the future of the village, for in 1842 "Cousin John" sold out, for a few hundreds, land now worth half a million or more, and departed. the machine started for the first time, persuaded a great number of young men to push. Their first efforts were of no avail, and the crowd began to jeer at the engineer. But he induced them to make a second trial, and just as they were putting forth their strength prodigiously, he turned on the steam, and sprang from under them, leaving a sprawling and dusty crowd to take his place as the butt of rustic raillery. Patience fails to recount the growth of the settlement into a village, and the expansion of the village into the city which now calls itself a metropolis. It seems to have been essentially a pioneer town, This same year also witnessed the first owing its life wholly to the railways, sale of real estate by public auction, and augmenting its size as new lines were one of those three town lots, bought then opened and the business of the older for an insignificant sum, has remained roads increased. It was in 1842 that the ever since in the hands of its original purfirst locomotive was seen in Atlanta. It chaser. It stands at the very centre of did not come, as locomotives usually do, business, is covered by a block of brick upon tracks laid up to that point, but was buildings, and simply by increase of value THE CHAIR VENDER. Union passenger station, which was accepted by the railroads, bringing the centre of growth in the town over to that spot. Thus money was lost and made, but the city increased in population, got rid of the criminal element which had predominated in her earlier history, educated the country people, became enterprising, and in assuming the powers and legal privileges of a municipality, took to herself city-like ways and pride, and asserted herself to be the gate to the South, through which all commerce and emigration from the Northwest must pass. The map of Atlanta shows a circular line representing the boundary, and having for its centre the railway station. The radius is one and a half miles. Within this circle (and somewhat also outside of it) is an array of streets so utterly irregular that you wonder how it was possible they ever could have been built up in that way. They go crooked where it would have been easier to go straight, show acute angles where a square corner could be made with less effort, and come to a sudden stop or run away into vacancy at the most unexpected points. The explanation is ready, and reminds one of the Dutch cowpaths which are said to have determined the pattern of lower New York. It must be remembered that before the town existed the east-and-west road from Marietta to Decatur and beyond now forms a snug fortune, giving a large | crossed at this point a road running annual yield to its owner. Speculation in real estate soon began, however, when it was seen that the prediction of John C. Calhoun, made years before, that Atlanta would be the metropolis of Georgia, was about to be verified. Before many years fancy prices were asked for property, and rents required that were out of all proportion to value. It was supposed at first that the town would be built some distance west of its present position, and money was invested in that region. Then a shrewd land-owner gave the site of the present north and south. They were such irregular rambling turnpikes as are characteristic of this hilly region, and the village extended itself along them without any attempt at straightening. Reckoning from the junction, as habitation spread, the road to Marietta naturally became Marietta Street, while that leading in the opposite direction was soon called Decatur Street. Not far north of the village was an old justice-court ground (a State reservation) known as the Peach-tree CourtHouse. A few miles southward stood a tavern, famous among all the teamsters but the evidence of the "chuck-hole" has | ice to a Turkish bath or a complete sysgone, or rather it is distributed throughout a mile of bad paving. Then the three railway lines introduced new factors of discord, and finally the owners of the original half-dozen farms and land lots each laid out streets for himself entirely irrespective of his neighbor. The result is a city in some parts easy, and in others very difficult, to get about in, and which, from a bird's or balloonist's point of view, must appear very confused. tem of telephonic communication. Yet, however comfortable this is for the citizen, it has the drawback to the magazine writer and artist that it makes Atlanta too much like a hundred other large towns with which we are all acquainted in the North, and leaves less that is peculiar, characteristic, and picturesque than perhaps exists in any other city in the South. She looks to me more like a Western town, since her newness and enterprise hardly affiliate her with Augusta, Savannah, Mobile, and the rest of the sleepy cotton markets, whose growth, if they have any, is imperceptible, and whose pulse beats with only a faint flutter. So, deriving her success from a multitude of business advantages, and from her favorable situation in point of geography and climate, Atlanta has waxed great and powerful, and, withal, very attractive. All the evidences of busy life are around you, and only unless you are fresh from New the stranger's eye. On Monday you may York or Baltimore or Chicago do you see tall, straight negro girls marching notice the provincial air. The telegraph through the street carrying enormous Vol. LX.-No. 355.-3 Yet there are certain features that strike |