"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before."
"The war seems to have stopped building because people can't afford it," the other suggested, "but it has only increased automobiling."
"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-tenths of them are traveling the road to ruin, I'm told, and apparently they can't get over the ground too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined in the amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of motors innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while they choked in the fumes of the gasolene.
The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances, and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.
"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why they should want to do it in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager? If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they must know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the horseman, and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can foreclose it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their car. Ah!" The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages, and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a policeman will pick me up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came to judgment."
"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and forgotten."
"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose their countenances after an emotional outbreak.
"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've known so little of either."
His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a vertiginous whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of their cars."
The younger sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving their lady-friends joy-rides."