Women's clothes, I found, as I strolled were very delicate and fine, and had a gracious dignity and sanity far removed from the frantic concoctions I remembered in the windows;--shredded patchwork of muslin and lace, necessarily frail and short-lived even as ornaments, never useful, and costing arduous labor in construction, with corresponding expense to the purchaser. The robes and gowns were a joy to the eye. Some showed less taste than others, naturally, but nowhere was to be seen the shameless ugliness so common in my youth. Beauty and peace, I found, care, leisure, quietness, plenty of gaiety, too, both in young and old. It struck me that the young people, owing to their wider and sounder upbringing, were more serious, and that older people, owing to their safer, easier lives, were jollier. These sweet-faced, broad-minded young women did not show so much giggling inanity as once seemed necessary to them; and a young man, even a young man in college, did not, therefore, find pleasure in theft, cruelty, gross practical jokes and destruction of property. As I noted this, I brought myself up with a start. It looked as if Nellie had written it. Surely, when I was in college--and there rose up within me a memory of the crass, wasteful follies that used to be called "pranks" in my time, and considered perfectly natural in young men. I had not minded them in those days. It gave me a queer feeling to see by my own words how my judgment was affected already. I explored the city from end to end, and satisfied myself that there was no poverty in it, no street that was not clean, no house that was not fit for human habitation. That is, as far as I could judge from an outside view. Among the masses of people, after their busy mornings, there were vast numbers who used the afternoons for learning, the easy, interesting, endless learning now carried on far and wide. The more they learned the more they wanted to know; and the best minds, free for research work, and upheld in it by the deepening attention of the world, constantly pushed on the boundaries of knowledge. There were some hospitals yet, but as one to a hundred of what used to be, of higher quality, and fuller usefulness. There were some of what I should have called prisons, though the life inside was not only as comfortable as that without, but administered with a stricter care for the advantage of those within. There were the moral sanitariums--healthful and beautiful, richly endowed with the world's best methods of improvement, and managed by the world's best people. It made me almost dizzy to try to take in this opposite pole of judgment on the criminal. Out of town I found that the park-like roads, so generally in use, by no means interfered with the wide stretches of what I used to call "real country." Intensive agriculture took less ground, rather more; and the wide use of food-bearing trees had restored the wooded aspect, so pleasant in every sense.