of
Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by depends
on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as
Brookline is central to Boston.

The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but remote
pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but between his
Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its artificial
reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond. I say this not
invidiously, but in justice to the beauties which surround our own
metropolis. To compare the situations of any dwellings in either of the
great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public Garden,
the waters of the Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth
Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer
clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her
right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be
ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars for
home. Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens; straggling
houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then Stamford: then
NORWALK. Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels of
the great disaster. But that my lids were heavy on that morning, my
readers would probably have had no further trouble with me. Two of my
friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave them
hanging over the abyss. From Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of
two hundred miles was a long funeral procession.

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its
phoenix-egg domes,--bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown
again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes
cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that
look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for
balls,--romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with a
detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so
murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be the
frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,--with its neat
carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-dormitories, its
vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows; Hartford,
substantial, well-bridged, many--steepled city,--every conical spire an
extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy;