Riding on the elevated proved to be great fun. Mary Jane was afraid for a few minutes she wasn’t going to like it—the stairs were so very high up with holes in each step to see down to the ground; and the train dashed to the platform with such a roar and bustle and people crowded on and jerk! the train rushed off. But when she settled down in the seat, comfortingly near her mother, and looked out over the roofs of houses and stores, and down long streets, one after another, she found she wasn’t a bit afraid and that she liked it very much. She liked watching for children on folks’ back porches. Some played on the porch and some played in the dining-room windows—it was easy to tell which were the dining-room windows because always there were three big windows and always she could look right through the curtains and see the big table in the middle of the room. The only trouble with watching folks from an elevated was that the train dashed by so quickly she couldn’t any more than see, till—flash, flash, and they were gone and there was another street and another set of back stairs and some different children playing. It really was awfully queer.
Pretty soon they reached the big down town and there they got off their train, climbed over a big bridge to another elevated train and away they went whizzing again. It certainly was a queer way to travel, Mary Jane thought.
But finally father announced that they had come to Garfield Park, so they got off, walked down the stairs to a park that looked so much like their own park that Mary Jane had to rub her eyes and look twice to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Here were the same winding driveways, beautiful trees and small lakes.
“Did we come back to our Park?” she asked in surprise.
“Oh, no,” answered Alice who had run on a little ahead, “look at the big greenhouse and look back there! Now don’t you see the swans?”
No, it wasn’t their own neighborhood park, Mary Jane soon realized that, because there were many new things to be seen. The wonderful tropical greenhouse where palms and bananas and wonderful ferns such as the girls had seen in Florida were growing. And then there were beautiful out of door gardens—Mary Jane liked those even better than the greenhouse gardens, wonderful as those were. She seemed to feel, someway, as though the flowers must like the out of doors better.
Right in the middle of the many lovely flower beds in the out of doors gardens, there was a lily pool in which grew water lilies of all colors and sorts. Mary Jane had never seen water lilies before and she thought them very lovely—and rather queer too, if the truth must be told. She decided she would stay right there a while and let Alice and her father explore the rest of the gardens—they wanted to know names of flowers and names didn’t seem a bit interesting to the little girl.
Just after she had decided to stay there and play, she spied a boy of about her age who was watching the lilies too.
“Can you walk all the way around the edge?” he asked her.
“Edge of what?” asked Mary Jane.