Caught in the gully below, the stream, which had suddenly contracted a habit of unruliness, tumbled onward under trees and through overhanging rocks until it joined the Mississippi a half-mile away.
There were other people, hordes of them, tempted by May sunshine.
“What is it, Ellery,” Dick demanded, “what deep-seated idealism is it that draws these crowds to the most beautiful spot near town as soon as spring offers more than half an invitation?”
“It certainly isn’t a poetry that crops out in their clothes or in their conversation,” Norris grumbled. “The staple remark seems to be, ‘Gee, ain’t it pretty?’”
“You mustn’t expect to see aristocracy here; this is too cheap, and too easy to reach. Your aristocrat prefers less beauty at greater effort and more cost. This is the place to touch elbows with the populace.”
They had climbed down the long winding steps by this time, and were leaning against the parapet of a small rustic bridge that crossed below the Falls.
“Let’s sit down on that bench,” said Dick, “and let the sunshine trickle through the trees and through us, and feel the spray in our nostrils, and delight in hanging maidenhair ferns, and watch the girls go by—the girls in pink and blue dresses, each leaning on the arm of a swain who grins. It’s vastly more fun than a fashionable parade.”
The branches met overhead, darkening the narrow chasm; the steep banks were spattered with dutchman’s breeches that fluttered like butterflies poised for a moment; down stream a few yards, where the valley widened, lay a tiny meadow where the sun fell full on a carpet of crow-foot violets that gave back the May sky. Two squirrels chased each other around a big maple, and a blue jay looked on and commented.
“Why is this stream of girls and men out for their holiday like baked ice-cream?” asked Dick. “That isn’t a conundrum; it’s a philosophic question.”
“I know, they give you the same sense of incongruity,” Ellery answered lazily.