We think that a man who had been out of Brooklyn for twenty years and whose recollections of the wonderful beach that forms her southern outpost were recollections of great gardens; of Patrick Gilmore playing inimitable marches in front of one giant hotel and of the incomparable Siedl leading his orchestra beside another, would do better than to return to Coney island. Siedl is dead; so is Gilmore and even the huge wooden hotel that looked down upon him was pulled apart last year to make room for the encroaching streets and houses of a growing Brooklyn. The paint and the tinsel of Coney island grows tarnished--and that twenty-year exile could find little else than the sea to hold his interest. And the folk who go to Coney island today seem to care very little for the sea--save perhaps as a giant bath-tub. We think that the absentee of twenty years' standing would do far better to go to Prospect Park. That really superb pleasure-ground, planned through the foresight of a Brooklyn man of half a century ago, remains practically unchanged through the years. It remains one of the great parks, not only of America, but of the entire world. It is the real lion of Brooklyn. It is incomparably finer than its rival, the somewhat neglected Central Park of Manhattan. And alas, Manhattan seems to think so, too, for to Prospect Park it sends each bright summer Sunday not the best but the roughest of its hordes. And Brooklyn sighs when it sees its lovely playground stolen from it. It is more than playground--Prospect Park. It is history. There are no historic buildings in Brooklyn--unless we except the Dutch Reformed church out in Flatbush--but all of Prospect Park was once a battlefield--the theater of that bitter and bloody conflict of July, 1776, when Washington was routed by British strategy and forced to retire from the city that he needed most of all to hold. Through its great meadows Continental and Briton and Hessian once marched with murder in their hearts. In those great meadows today the boys and girls of the Brooklyn of today play tennis; the older men, after the fashion of the Brooklyn of other days, their croquet. And annually down the greensward the little children of Brooklyn march in brilliant June-time pageant.