person of their foreman touching
their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded cottage of the
keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the
former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the stone
mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague collection of
minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior the ineffectual
state of a time already further outdated than any colonial prime; the
old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into foam in
the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from shore to shore, with
steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and other steel-engraving
presences by the water's brink.

The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that generous
park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense; that you may
stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess yourself
indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your own.

They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of public proprietorship which
will one day, no doubt, supersede all private ownership. You have your
share of the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the beasts,
from the lions and elephants in their palaces, and the giraffes freely
browsing and grazing in their paddock, down to the smallest of the small
mammals giving their odor in their pens. You have as much right as
another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as your colored chairman
will repeatedly tell you) on the mansions of the lordlier brutes, and
there is none to dispute your just portion of the Paris-green zinc
iguana, for you have helped pay for them all.

The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to find whether your
driver will make you pay him too much, but when you tot up the hours by
his tariff, and timidly suggest that it will be so many dollars and
offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by saying, No, he owes
you fifty cents on that; and paying it back.

Such at least was the endearing experience of the companions at the end
of their day's pleasure. Not that it was really the end, for there was
the airy swoop homeward in the Elevated train, through all that ugly
picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of buildings, with the
added interest of seeing the back-flying streets below now full of
children let loose from school for the afternoon, and possessing the
roadways and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property l