short as a fast
horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by
clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,--but it
cost me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars 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 o