“At last my dream had come true, and when I found myself projected upon that thrilling avenue, and realized that I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do until luncheon-time, and I could skip that if I wished, I could scarcely believe that it was I who had thus broken the traces.
“The green of the park greeted me, and, like Raleigh's cloak,[55] a gay pattern of flowers was laid at the entrance for even my unworthy feet metaphorically to tread. And to think that these bright blooms unfolded here day after day and I had so seldom seen them! An old man dozed on a bench near at hand, oblivious to the beauty around him; and a septuagenarian gardener leaned over the circular border, just as Narcissus[56] looked into the pool. Perhaps he saw some image of his youth in the uplifted face of a flower.
“I know that I saw paths and byways everywhere that reminded me of my vanished boyhood; for I am one of those who have always lived in Manhattan, and some of the happiest days I ever spent were those in the park as a child, seeing the menagerie, feeding the squirrels, and rolling a hoop on a graveled pathway.
“I remembered Rossetti's line,[57] 'I have been here before,' as I walked along on this exultant morning; and it indeed seemed as if in some previous incarnation, and not in this life, I had known my footsteps to take this perfumed way. For in the hurry of life and in the rush of our modern days we forget too soon the leisure of childhood, plunging as we do into the rough-and-tumble of an agonized manhood.
“And all this was while the park, like a green island set in a throbbing sea, had waited for me to come back to it! No lake isle of Innesfree[58] could have beguiled the poet more. Anchored at a desk, I had dreamed often of such an hour of freedom; and now that it was really mine, I determined that I would not analyze it, but that I would simply drink in its wonder. It would have been as criminal as to pluck a flower apart.
“Policemen went their weary rounds, swinging their sticks, and it suddenly came to me that even in this sylvan retreat there was stern labor to be done. Just as some one, some time, must sweep out a shrine,—possibly nowadays with a vacuum-cleaner!—so papers must be picked from God's grass, and pick-pockets must be diligently looked for in holiday crowds. Men on high and practical sprinkling-carts must keep the roadways clean, and emissaries of the law must see to it that motorists do not speed too fast. You think of ice-cream as being miraculously made in a park pavilion, and unless you visit the city woodland at the hour of eleven or so in the morning, you may keep your dream. But I beheld a common ice-wagon back up to the door of that cherished house of my childhood, and a strong, rough fellow proved himself the connecting-link between the waitress and her eager little customers.
“At this hour it was as though I had gone behind the scenes of a theater while the stage-hands were busy about their necessary labors. Wiring had to be done,—I had forgotten that they have telephones even in the park,—and a mason was repairing a crumbling wall. How much better to let it crumble, I thought. But all my practicality, through my sense of strange freedom, had left me, and I was ardent for a mad, glad world, where for a long time there would be nothing for anybody to do. I wanted masons and policemen and icemen and nurse-maids and electricians and keepers of zoölogical gardens to be as free as I, forever and ever.
“You see, my unexpected holiday had gone to my head, and it was a summer morning, and I felt somehow that I ought to be working rather than loitering here.
“I suppose I shall be sane to-morrow, but I wonder if I want to be.”
And we all wondered if we didn't like him better when he was just this way, a child with a new toy, or, rather, a child with an old toy that he had almost but not quite forgotten how to play with.