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 Igion, 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 Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its artificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond.  I say this not invidiously, but in justice to the beauties which surround our own metropolis.  To compare the situations of any dwellings in either of the great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street.  St. Botolph’s daughter dresses in plainer clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars for home.  Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens; straggling houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then Stamford:  then Norwalk.  Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels of the great disaster.  But that my lids were heavy on that morning, my readers would probably have had no further trouble with me.  Two of my friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave them hanging over the abyss.  From Norwalk to Boston, that day’s journey of two hundred miles was a long funeral procession.