We have been here nearly two months, and in those two months we have learnt that American ideas are on the whole, good ideas. There is usually reason in most things that Americans do, and good reasons, as for instance, in prohibition. But there is another prohibition quite different from the one that most people talk about, and it’s unexplained. It concerns Dick. When I say that it concerns him I do not mean that it affects him alone. He is merely voicing the great “why?” of a million children, who may not walk on the grass in Central Park. “Keep Off”--“Keep Off” is written everywhere. It takes a great many men in, uniform to enforce this prohibition. Strong men, vigilant men, diligent men, too. Just as the policemen seem to be picked for Fifth Avenue traffic, policemen who seem to be entirely friendly towards children, whose one idea is to help them across the street and to laugh and joke with them as he does so (Dick has several friends on the Avenue) just so the parkmen seem to be picked for their job. They are hard men, cold men, they smile not neither do they joke. They are like people who have been too long with children. I learnt my lesson a few days ago when for a great treat Dick took me for a walk in Central Park. With the perfect courage of an ignorant person, I tossed my head, drank in deep breaths of fresh spring air, and strode out across the open. It was the first day of spring, and how good it seemed. Suddenly Dick seized my arm and pointing to a distant blot in the landscape said to me, “That is for you--don’t you hear the whistle?” I confessed I heard a whistle, but I thought someone was calling a dog. “That is for you to get off the grass--.” But I was a long way on the grass. I seemed to be in the middle of a sea of green. True, no one was on it but myself, but that had not seemed to me peculiar. If I thought about it at all I just thought Americans were too busy to loaf like me, in the sun. “Are you sure we mayn’t walk on the grass?” I asked Dick. He was quite sure, and made some signal to the whistleman to the effect that we would remove ourselves to the far distant path. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him. And then I learnt what prohibition means; that you do the thing that is prohibited just as often as you can, until you are found out. What a game for one’s early days--to dodge the law, and deliberately break it on every possible occasion. I asked a park-keeper whom I met later on what the regulations were and learnt that towards May there are certain places in the park that may be walked on, in turn. This will be indicated by a flag flying high or a flag lying low, I couldn’t quite make out. The children had been unlucky this year, the keeper said, because there had been so little snow, which enables them to go anywhere. Dick is unlucky, because he arrived in New York in February, and will leave before May, so he has missed and will miss any chance of walking on the grass!