It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then before them, like the “army” in a beggarly stage-show.  Suppose I should really wish, some time or other, to get away from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some one of them was not a neighbor?

A little less than a year before, after the Ball’s-Bluff accident, the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our homeward journey at the Fifth-Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously.  We were not so peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really very full.  Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,—­to reach the neighborhood of which last the per ardua of three or four flights of stairs was formidable for any mortal, wounded or well.  The “vertical railway” settled that for us, however.  It is a giant corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position.  This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Ixion, and the other Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels that it is his property,—­at least, as much as it is anybody’s.  My Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards.

I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that we rested at our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds the citizens had been arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen.  The Central Park is an expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as to form ridges which will give views and hollows that will hold water.  The hips and elbows and other bones of Nature stick out here and there in the shape of rocks which give character to the scenery, and an unchangeable, unpurchasable look to a landscape that without them would have been in danger of being fattened by art and money out of all its native features.  The roads were fine, the sheets of water beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse’s winter coat.  I could not learn whether it was kept so by clipping or singeing.  I was delighted with my new property,—­but it cost me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the fashionable quarter.  What it will be by-and-by depends on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as Brookline is central to Boston.  The question is not between Mr. Olmsted’s admirably arranged, but remote pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but between his Eccentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its artificial reservoirs