I may be mistaken. His thoughts may never take this turn at all. The poor are slaves of habit, they bear what they have borne, they suffer on from generation to generation, and seem to look for nothing different. But this is what I think for poor people in the Park, not alone for the workman recently out of work, but for the workman so long out of it that he has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in the light of the autumnal leaves. That is the great trouble in New York; you cannot anywhere get away from the misery of life. You would think that the rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions bettered, so that they might not be confronted at every turn by the mere loathliness of poverty. But they likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the rich have gone since the beginning of time. Sometimes I think that as Shakespeare says of the living and the dead, the rich and the poor are “but as pictures” to one another, without vital reality. Sometimes I am glad to lose the sense of their reality, and this is why I would rather walk in the pathways of the Park than in the streets of the city, for the contrasts there are not so frequent, if they are glaring still. I do get away from them now and then, for a moment or two, and give myself wholly up to the delight of the place. It has been treated with the artistic sense which always finds its best expression in the service of the community, but I do not think we generally understand this, the civic spirit is so weak in us yet; and I doubt if the artists themselves are conscious of it, they are so rarely given the chance to serve the community. When this chance offers, however, it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the system of parks at Chicago, the gardened spaces at Washington, and the Central Park in New York. Some of the decorative features here are bad, the sculpture is often foolish or worse, and the architecture is the outgrowth of a mood, where it is not merely puerile. The footways have been asphalted, and this is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place, but the whole design, and much of the detail in the treatment of the landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly and poetic genius. The Park is in no wise taken away from nature, but is rendered back to her, when all has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, breaking into meadows, here and there, and brightened with pools and ponds lurking among rude masses of rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, in the heart of the city, a memory of the land as it was before the havoc of the city began, and giving to the city-prisoned poor an image of what the free country still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well-kept drives and paths; and it is in these paths that I find my pleasure. They are very simple woodland paths, but for the asphalt; though here