o the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society of
parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to see
the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her
imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us
in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in
the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the
cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated
upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and
wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other
water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this
kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in
which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and equality,
instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and fear.

Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an
invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the
Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the
slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of
the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now
added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their
fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to share
their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the region of
the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse and man.
These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it stretched
itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue heaven,
rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not feel, as
their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide
grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and blossomy
sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim.

But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so richly
jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the reader's
lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in
bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still in the
silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass springing
slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or giving up
its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from
their leisurely employ, and once in the