s conventional about beauty than about
other things. If he believes that the beauty of a city lies in a
level cornice-line, converging vistas, malls of trees, "civic
centres," of what use to tell him that there may be a beauty as well
of non-conformity, when the magic veil of twilight wraps the city
round, and twinkling lamps climb unbelievable heights and all the town
is a mighty nocturne in blue and gold? We would not be thought to say
that New York is always beautiful, or that a great deal of it is not
much of the time ugly beyond hope. But there is not a street of it
from end to end but has some point of pictorial charm, whence one may
see a span of the Brooklyn Bridge leaping over the tenements, or the
scholastic Gothic spire of the City College chapel crowning the rocks
at the close of the vista, or just a rosy sunset over the Hoboken
hills. And there are parks and squares of almost constant charm,
though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the
uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are
certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab
mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of
masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber.
Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening
when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along
upper Broadway, like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make "all the
night a steam of fire," and round the tall tower of the Times Building
the vapour clouds drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam of
light from a window high aloft. After all, it is no great credit to
any of us to find the ugliness in New York. The ugliness is rather
obvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task, and might make us more
keen to cherish and to expand it. It is there for the seeing eye.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

_Spring in the Garden_

No daffodils "take the winds of March with beauty" in our Berkshire
gardens. What daffodils we have in that month of alternate slush and
blizzard bloom in pots, indoors. But one sign of spring the gardens
holds no less plain to read, even if some people may not regard it as
so poetic--over across the late snow, close to the hotbed frames, a
great pile of fresh stable manure is steaming like a miniature
volcano. To the true gardener, tha