It is not necessary to go far away from the beaten paths of travel in Greater New York to witness any of these scenes of the comedy, sometimes tragedy, brought about by the contending forces of city and country. Most of what has been cited can be observed from car-windows. For that matter, somewhat similar incongruity can be found in all of our modern, legally enlarged cities, London, with the hedges and gardens of Hampstead Heath, and certain parts of the Surrey Side, or Chicago, with its broad stretches of prairie and farms--the subject of so many American newspaper jokes a few years ago. [Illustration: The Old Water-power Mill from the Rear of the Old Country Cross-roads Store.] [Illustration: The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828. In the background is the old water-power mill.] [Illustration: Interior of the Old Country Cross-roads Store.] But New York--and this is another respect in which it is different from other cities--our great Greater New York, which is better known as having the most densely populated tenement districts in the world, can show places that are more truly rural than any other city of modern times, places where the town does not succeed in obtruding itself at all. From Hampstead Heath, green and delightful as it is, every now and then the gilded cross of St. Paul's may be seen gleaming far below through the trees. And in Chicago, bucolic as certain sections of it may be, one can spy the towers of the city for miles away, across the prairie; even when down in certain wild, murderous-looking ravines there is ever on high the appalling cloud of soft-coal smoke. But out in the broad, rolling farm lands of Long Island you can walk on for hours and not find any sign of the city you are in, except the enormous tax-rate, which, by the way, has the effect of discouraging the farmers (many of whom did not want to become city people at all) from spending money for paint and improvements, and this only results in making the country look more primitive, and less like what is absurdly called a city. [Illustration] [Illustration: The Colony of Chinese Farmers, Near the Geographical Centre of New York City.] But the best of these rural parts of town cannot be spied from car-windows, or the beaten paths of travel. II Make a journey out through the open country to the southeast of Flushing, past the Oakland Golf Club, and over toward the Creedmoor Rifle Range, after a while turn north and follow a twisting road that leads down into the ravine at the head of Little Neck Bay, where a few of the many Little Neck clams come from. All of these places are well within the eastern boundary of the city, and this little journey will furnish a very good example of a certain kind of rural New York, but only one kind, for it is only one small corner of a very big place. [Illustration: Working as industrially as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red handkerchiefs about their heads....]