and there an effect of art is studied with charming felicity; and I like to mount some steps graded in the rock at one place and come upon a plinth supporting the bust of a poet, as I might in an old Italian garden. But there is otherwise very little effect of gardening except near the large fountain by the principal lake where there is some flare of flowers on the sloping lawns. There is an excess in the viaduct, with its sweeping stairways, and carven freestone massiveness; but it is charming in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of lotuses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much notice the bronze angel atop, who seems to be holding her skirt to one side and picking her steps, and to be rather afraid of falling into the water. There is, in fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in the Park, which I am glad to find in sympathy with the primeval suggestiveness of the landscape gardening: an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the Indians must have hunted through the wilds here before the white men came. II. This group is always a great pleasure to me, from whatever point I come upon it, or catch a glimpse of it; and I like to go and find the dog’s prototype in the wolves at the menagerie which the city offers free to the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging its grounds and houses. The captive brutes seem to be of that solidarity of good-fellowship which unites all the frequenters of the Park; the tigers and the stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me from tigers and lions shown for profit. Among the milder sorts, I do not care so much for the wallowing hippopotamuses, and the lumbering elephants, and the supercilious camels which one sees in menageries everywhere, as for those types which represent a period as extinct as that of the American pioneers; I have rather a preference for going and musing upon the ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths open at the pale of their paddock, expecting the children’s peanuts, and unconscious of their importance as survivors of the untold millions of their kind which a quarter of a century ago blackened the Western plains for miles and miles. There are now only some forty or fifty left; for of all the forces of our plutocratic conditions, so few are conservative that the American buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned American mechanic, proud of his independence, and glorying in his citizenship.