GLORIA AND THE GARDEN OF SWEDEN
IT WAS one of those gilded October days when the serene sunshine is as soft and tawny as candle-light; when the air is thin and sharp in the early mornings, but the noontime is as comfortably genial as the radiance of a hearth reddened with hickory embers. Dove Dulcet and I were strolling along Riverside Park, enjoying the blue elixir of the afternoon, in which there was just a faint prick, a gently tangible barb of the coming arrows of the North.
“Winter sharpens her spearheads,” said Dulcet. “Aye,” was my reply. Below us I saw the coaling-station at the Seventy-ninth Street pier. “The merriest music the householder can hear nowadays is the roar of coal going down the chute into the cellar.”
He sighed, and seemed touched by a sudden melancholy.
“Ben,” he said, “that coal-dump reminds me of Gloria Larsen. Did I ever tell you about her?”
“Never,” I said. “Coal, I presume, made you think of diamonds; and diamonds, of Miss Larsen. Were you engaged to her?”
“I might have been,” he said, sentimentally. Before us was an empty bench, on a little knoll that looks out over the shining sweep of the river. I drew him to it, and we filled our pipes. When you can get a minor poet in an autobioloquacious mood, it is well to encourage him. No one takes life so seriously as the minor poet, and consequently his memoirs make fine sport for the disinterested bystander.
“No,” he said, blowing a waft of tobacco smoke into the soft, sun-brimmed air, and settling down into the curve of the bench. “The association was even more obvious than that of coal and diamonds. I always think of Gloria when winter begins to come in.”
“Ah!” I said. “She was cold?”