which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and equality,
instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and fear.
Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an
invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the
Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the
slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of
the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now
added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their
fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to share
their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the region of
the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse and man.
These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it stretched
itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue heaven,
rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not feel, as
their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide
grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and blossomy
sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim.
But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so richly
jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the reader's
lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in
bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still in the
silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass springing
slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or giving up
its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from
their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their foreman touching
their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded cottage of the
keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the
former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the stone
mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague collection of
minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior the ineffectual
state of a time already further outdated than any colonial prime; the
old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into foam in
the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from shore to shore, with
steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and other steel-engraving
presences by the water's brink.
The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that generous
park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense; that you may
stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess yourself
indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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