They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is not against a permanent _folie des grandeurs_ that we need seek to guard the victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing to intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself a public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition. In this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could strike the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and, having appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty and subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and temperate. In calling the speakers successively up, he could protest against anything that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already spoken, and could invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and achievements in the speeches to follow. X A DAY AT BRONX PARK In the beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance, but should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make the most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love. * * * * * By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house on which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street. This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life: the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind, which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale. When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track and let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the Spanish Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinita de' Monti at Rome.