oing by you in the night.

There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in New
York, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which you
do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No
doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush
and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave
of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the
smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds
them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, can
captivate the senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn--which no
self-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do except
under compulsing!--you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the evening
shadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs'
Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted against
the sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow and
twinkle and dark figures move mysteriously.

But it is not even necessary to enter the parks of New York to find
the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison
Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion,
from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and
to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares
reward the seeing eye with many an unguessed delight.

For ten years my rooms were six stories up on the east side of
Washington Square, and for ten years, at all seasons and all hours, I
walked daily up-town through Madison Square to the Rialto, and back
again. I have often regretted that I kept no note-book of the changing
aspects of these two oases, as one keeps a note-book of the seasons in
the country. Spring comes in Washington and Madison Squares with signs
no less unmistable than the hepaticas by the woodland road. The
western wall of the Flatiron Building has its autumnal colorings; and
though the first snow fall may be black mud by noon, at sun-up those
brick-bounded areas laugh in white and the aged trees arch their
fantastic tracery.

Spring in the Square! The central fountain is playing again its
rainbow jet of spray, the tulips are a jaunty ring about it, the
benches have put forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you must
not think too much of the benches nor look at them too long!), the
shrill children are everywhere, the green 'busses are gay wit