lly in the world of
journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and
the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something
to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in
search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that
the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance, but
should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make the
most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love.

* * * * *

By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house on
which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of
lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions
were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region
of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet
visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long
succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the
guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and
simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street.
This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the
slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life:
the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and
rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind,
which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale.

When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and
tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the
ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they
did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track and
let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the Spanish
Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinita de' Monti at Rome.

It was, of course, like that only in their fond remembrance, but this
was not the only Roman quality in their cup of pleasure that day; and
they did not care to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring extract
of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian sky overhead, the
classic architectural forms, the loosely straggling grass, the flowering
woods, the rapture of the birds, the stretches of the river, the
tumbling rapids, which so delicately intoxicated them. There was a
certain fountain gave