But if the beauty of Broadway as a country high-road had been marred by its adaptation to the exigencies of a suburb of moderate means, we boys felt the deprivation but little. To right and to left, as we wandered northward, five minutes' walk would take us into a country of green lanes and meadows and marshland and woodland; where houses and streets were as yet too few to frighten away that kindly old Dame Nature who was always so glad to see us. If you turned to the right-to the east, that is you found the laurelbordered fields where we played baseball-I don't mean that the fields sprouted with laurels for us boys in those old days of 29 to 34 scores, but that the Kalmia latifolia crowned the gray rocks that cropped out all around. Farther up was the wonderful and mysterious old house of Madame JumelAaron Burr's Madane Jumelset apart from all other houses by its associations with the fierce vindictive passions of that strange old woman, whom, it seems to me, I can still vaguely remember, seated very stiff and upright in her great old family carriage. At the foot of the heights, on this side, the Har

lem River flowed between its marshy margins to join Spuyten Duyvil Creekthe Harlem with its floats and boats and bridges and ramshackle docks, and all the countless delights of a boating river. Here also was a certain dell, half-way up the heights overlooking McComb's Dam Bridge, where countless violets grew around a little spring, and where there was a real cave, in which, if real pirates had not left their treasure, at least real tramps had slept and left a real smell. And on top of the cave there was a stone which was supposed to retain the footprint of a pre-historic Indian. From what I remember of that footprint I am inclined to think that it must have been made by the foot of a derrick, and not by that of an Indian.

But it was on the other side of the Island, between the Deaf and Dumb Asylum and Tubby Hook, and between the Ridge and the River, that I most loved to ramble. Here was the slope of a woodland height running down to a broad low strip, whose westernmost boundary was the railroad embankment, beyond which lay the broad blue Hudson, with Fort Lee and the first upspringing of the Palisades, to be seen by glimpses through the tree-trunks. This was, I think, the prettiest piece of flowerspangled wildwood that I have ever seen. For centuries it had drained the richness of that long and lofty ridge. The life of lawns and gardens had gone into it; the dark wood-soil had been washed

from out the rocks on the brow of the hill; and down below there, where a vagrom brooklet chirped its way be

tween green stones, the wholesome soil bloomed forth in grateful luxuriance. From the first coming of the anemone

and the hepatica, to the time of the asters, there was always something growing there to delight the scent or the sight; and most of all do I remember the huge clumps of Dutchman's-breeches-the purple and the waxy white as well as the honey-tipped scarlet.

There were little sunlit clearings here, and I well recall the day when, looking across one of these, I saw something that stood awkwardly and conspicuously out of the young wood-grass -a raw stake of pine wood, and beyond that, another stake, and another; and parallel with these another row, marking out two straight lines, until the bushes hid them. The surveyors had begun to lay out the line of the new Boulevard, on which you may now roll in your carriage to Inwood, through the wreck of the woods where I used to scramble over rock and treetrunk, going toward Tubby Hook.

It was on the grayest of gray November days last year that I had the unhappy thought of revisiting this love of my youth. I followed familiar trails, guided by landmarks I could not forget - although they had somehow grown incredibly poor and mean and shabby, and had entirely lost a certain dignity that they had until then kept quite clearly in my remembrance. And behold, they were no

me. A

longer landmarks except to change had come over the face of this old playground of mine. It had forgotten the withered, modest grace of the time when it was middle-aged, and when I was a boy. It was checkered and gridironed with pavements and electric lights. The Elevated Railroad roared at its doors behind clouds of smoke and steam. Great, cheerless, hideously ornate flat buildings reared their zinc-tipped fronts toward the gray heaven, to show the highest aspirations of that demoralized suburb in the way of domestic architecture. To right, to left, every way I turned, I saw a cheap, tawdry, slipshod imitation of the real city-or perhaps I should say, of all that is ugliest and vulgarest, least desirable, and least calculated to endure, in the troubled face of city life. I was glad to get away; glad that the gray mist that rolled up from the Hudson River hid from my sight within its fleecy bosom some details of that vulgar and pitiful degradation. One place alone I found as I had hoped to find it. Ex-Mayor Tiemann's house was gone, his conservatory was a crumbling ruin; the house we decked for Lincoln's death was a filthy tenement with a tumble-down gallery where the old portico had stood, and I found very little on my upward pilgrimage that had

cemetery that belongs to old Trinity had dandified itself with a wonderful wall and a still more wonderful bridge to its annex-or appendix, or extension, or whatever you call it. But just above it is a little enclosure that is called a park-a place where a few people of modest, old-fashioned, domestic tastes had built their houses together to join in a common resistance against the encroachments of the speculator and the nomad house-hunter. I found this little settlement undisturbed, uninvaded, save by a sort of gentle decay that did it no ill-service, in my eyes. The pale dust was a little deeper in the roadways that had once been paved with limestone, a few more brown autumn leaves had fallen in the corners of the fences, the clustered wooden houses all looked a little more rustily respectable in their reserved and sleepy silence-a little bit more, I thought, as if they sheltered a colony of old maids. Otherwise it looked pretty much as it did when I first saw it, well nigh thirty years ago.

To see if there were anything alive in that misty, dusty, faded little abode of respectability, I rang at the door of one house, and found some inquiries to make concerning another one that seemed to be untenanted.

It was a very pretty young lady who opened the door for me, with such

shining dark eyes and with so bright a red in her cheeks, that you felt she could not have been long in that dull, old-time spot, where life seemed to be

all one neutral color. She answered my questions kindly, and then, with something in her manner which told me that strangers did not often wander in there, she said that it was a very nice place to live in. I told her that I knew it had been a very nice place to live in.

T is no reflection on the Columbian show to confess that perhaps the pleasantest moments are those spent in resting one's rebellious limbs upon a bench and in watching the crowd. It may be less novel and possibly less instructive than some other exhibits, but it is often more amusing. One realizes in studying this infinite stream of humanity how little he really knows, personally, of his own countrymen. New types seem to have sprung into existence for the sole purpose of appearing at this fair. It gives one a startling realization of the varying effects of climate, food, and mode of life upon our brothers and sisters. Voice, manner, color, size, shape, and mental fittings are so widely different as to suggest varieties in race. But we are all Americans, and those from the interior are more American than the others.

If the native Indian were of a reflective turn of mind, all this might awaken unpleasant thoughts. Judging from outside appearance, however, he has no thoughts whatever. He stalks solemnly about the grounds with a face as impassive as his wooden counterparts on Sixth Avenue. And yet he is the American. He is the only one among us who had ancestors to be discovered. He is the aboriginal; the first occupant and

owner; the only one here with an hereditary right to the country we are celebrating. Perhaps the native realizes this in his own stolid fashion. As he stalks about among the dazzling structures of the Fair, and tries, or more likely, does not try, to grasp the innumerable wonders of art and science that only annoy and confuse him, it may require a too exhausting mental effort to recall the fact that his own grandfather very likely pursued the bounding buffalo over the waste of prairie now covered by the city of Chicago. He, at least, if his education permitted it, could claim historic connection with the country when Columbus came so near discovering it; whereas our own connection with the discoverer is certainly remote, and sometimes suggests (with the fact that he from whom we have named the Fair never actually saw this particular country) that we are taking liberties with his name.

The unconquerable American desire to do things on a bigger scale than anybody else, which often results in our "biting off more than we can chew," has again run away with us. There are many illustrations of this gnawing hunger at the World's Fair. In fact the Fair itself, as a whole, comes painfully near being an illustration in point. A

colossal enterprise too vast and complex to permit of its attaining a perfect finish in the time allowed, seems to give more joy to our occidental spirits than any possible perfection on a smaller scale. Crudity has little terror for us. The whole scheme is so vast and comprehensive, and the scale so hopelessly magnificent that the visitor finds he has neither the spirit, spine, nor legs to even partially take it in. In fact the farther he goes the more he realizes the futility of the undertaking. And the hapless enthusiast who proposes to see, even superficially, the more important exhibits, should be fitted with a wroughtiron spine, nerves of catgut, and one

goes there with intent to thoroughly "do it" is laying up for himself anguish of mind and the complete annihilation of his muscular and nervous force. It is far too big for any question of conscience to be allowed to enter in. Its bigness is beyond description. No words or pictures can tell the story of its size. Experience alone can teach it. You must go there day after day, to return at night with tired eyes and aching limbs, and with the bitter and ever increasing knowledge that as an exhibition you can never grasp it. Where other exhibitions have been satisfied with a display of an hundred cubic feet of any special article, Chicago must have