The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. It was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on the south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a landscape gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, which was brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all about the bottom lands and in the brush. To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should be shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to accomplish something worth while, to make a name--it looked like a weedy road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still, after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would be blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway. Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be sent after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way, Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch. Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on the subject. Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. A wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the road and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic capers. Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy neighbourhood--factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with refuse--and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from its lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures with cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the river bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed a band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port Argent on a Sunday afternoon. The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter current here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep bluffs on either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores.