eglect; but the exceptions are not rare where an
attempt at improvement has resulted in a sort of cemetery look that
gives any thing but a cheerful, pleasure-ground aspect.

There is not much danger that persons who are enthusiastic for the
improvement of the town in which they live will err on the side of too
great simplicity. The public squares and parks of large and wealthy
cities are regulated and maintained at great cost and under skilful and
artistic management; and they cannot fail to strike country visitors as
being in all ways desirable. So indeed they are. They are a chief
element of the city's beauty, and, from an aesthetic point of view, their
influence is the best to which its people are subjected. But their
beauty and their aesthetic influence are both the result of a
well-directed expenditure of large sums of money. It is quite natural
that an enriched manufacturer or merchant, proud of his native village,
should be ambitious to perpetuate the memory of his benefaction by
providing for some corresponding decoration of its public green, and
that he should attempt to reproduce there, on the smaller scale
proportionate to the circumstances, the sort of magnificence that he has
seen in the city park. If left to his own sweet will,--as he often is if
he is willing to spend money for the public benefit,--he will, unless a
rich man of the rarer sort, succeed only in producing a conspicuous
imitation.

A park-railing of artistically-worked wrought-iron will be represented
by a cast-iron substitute of much more elaborate device; and there will
probably be "piled on," here and there, an amount of cheap ornamentation
which at the first glance will have a certain imposing effect. In the
matter of planting there may be an amount and variety of foreign
shrubbery and sub-tropical plants, which, under proper care, would be of
great value and beauty, but which, with the neglect to which they are
doomed in their village home, are quite certain to abort. In fact, we
may expect to see, what indeed we may now see, in painful degree, in
many of our smaller towns, a halting attempt at the outside show of the
city park, which, in the absence of those elements of artistic selection
and appropriateness to the conditions which are to prevail, develop, as
time goes on, into an ignominious failure.

The trouble is, that, in all expenditures of this sort, we are apt to
begin at the wrong end. In the making of a park, every step that