"Few?" the elder retorted. "There are lots of them. I've counted twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful myself."
As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year."
The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: "Not at all. I've seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October."
"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."
"Well—no."
"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till the first cold snap, and there won't be a single victoria or butterfly left."
"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and victorias belong to the youth of the year and the world. And the sad thing is that we won't have our palingenesis."
"Why not?" the younger sage demanded. "What is to prevent your coming back in two or three thousand years?"
"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems? Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough, swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair. And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was, like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."
"Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.