porch, ironically
beside a spinning-wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that you lift
your eyes the sooner to look above and beyond it. It occupies, of
course, a slit between higher buildings. Through that slit, as you
stand on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly black
chimney-stacks in the foreground directly to the Metropolitan Tower,
booming up suddenly and unexpectedly. You see only that for a moment,
because of its Titanic size and white impressiveness. Then you notice
something outlined against it, a lower tower, much more slender, a
mere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and crowning it, her bow
forever poised, the lovely limbed Diana. Whence either of these towers
come, you see not. They merely spring up into the vision over the roof
of the little wooden house, the darker one outlined against the other
for comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseen
buildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points her
shaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier for
this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its
femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk
through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as
picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city,
anywhere, affords--forty stories looking down on two and a half, and
between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana.

Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horses
falling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining the
streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. "The
frolic architecture" of the snow is a thing of memory, not of present
fact. Like Whittier, we recall the hooded well-sweep or fantastic
pump, and the great drifts by the pasture wall. Yet, once again, it is
the seeing eye we lack, nor do we need even to enter the Park to
discover the snow at its artistic handiwork. Let Sixty-fifth Street
enter the Park for you, from the east, and do you stand upon Fifth
Avenue and note the conversion from ugliness to beauty of a paved
road, dipping into a dugway between dirty stone walls. The soiled
pavement is hidden now, each rough stone on the bounding walls is
softly outlined with white, not far into the Park a graceful stone
foot-bridge spans the sunken street, supporting a second and more
graceful arch of snow, and the street curves alluringly into the trees
w