"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems? Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough, swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair. And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was, like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past." "Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud. The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A joke?" he challenged. "Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme." "I didn't know you were a poet." "I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you that danger for danger your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing human creature?" "It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But there was only one of it, and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour." "That's true," the younger sage assented. "But there was always a fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were tamed, but, after all, they were only _trained_ animals, like Hagenback's." "And what is a chauffeur?"