"We don't have any mosquitoes here on the north shore," put in the other, addressing us without blinking. He is probably the humorist of the neighborhood.
*****
This is only one of the many pilgrimages that may be made in Greater New York, and shows only one sort of rurality. It is the great variety of unurban scenes that is the most impressive thing about this city. Here is another sort, seen along certain parts of Jamaica Bay:
Long, level sweeps of flat land, covered with tall, wild grass that the sea-breezes like to race across. The plain is intersected here and there with streams of tide-water. At rare intervals there are lonely little clumps of scrub-oaks, huddled close together for comfort. Away off in the distance the yellow sand-dunes loom up as big as mountains, and beyond is the deep, thrilling blue of the open sea, with sharp-cut horizon.
The sun comes up, the wonderful color tricks of the early morning are exhibited, and the morning flight of birds begins. The tide comes hurrying in, soon hiding the mud flats where the snipe were feeding. The breeze freshens up, and whitecaps, like specks, can be seen on the distant blue band of the ocean.... The sun gets hot. The tide turns. The estuaries begin to show their mud-banks again. The sun sinks lower; and distant inlets reflect it brilliantly. The birds come back, the breeze dies down, and the sun sets splendidly across the long, flat plain; another day has passed over this part of a so-called city and no man has been within a mile of the spot. The nearest sign of habitation is the lonely life-saving station away over there on the dunes, and, perhaps, a fisherman's shanty. Far out on the sky-line is the smoke of a home-coming steamer, whose approach has already been announced from Fire Island, forty miles down the coast.
Another Kind of City Life—Along the Marshes of Jamaica Bay.
Then, here is another sort: A rambling, stony road, occasionally passing comfortable old houses—historic houses in some cases—with trees and lawns in front, leading down to stone walls that abut the road. The double-porticoed house where Aaron Burr died is not far from here. An old-fashioned, stone-arched bridge, a church steeple around the bend, a cluster of trees, and under them, a blacksmith shop. Trudging up the hill is a little boy, who stares and sniffles, carrying a slate and geography in one hand, and leading a little sister by the other, who also sniffles and stares. This, too, is Greater New York, Borough of Richmond, better known as Staten Island. This borough has nearly all kinds of wild and tame rurality and suburbanity. Its farms need not be described.
III
Pointing out mere farms in the city becomes rather monotonous; they are too common. But there is one kind of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough, in about the centre of the 317 square miles of New York—so well as the centre of a boot-shaped area can be located.