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?"

"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously.
"Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in
the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and
I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time.
They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer
overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another
diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the
purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have
another hero to win one."

"Well, we must hop