in Brooklyn take pride in
keeping up old friendships and in dressing without ostentation. There
are old gentlemen who use only the ferries in coming to New York,
because they regard the bridges as a novelty open to the suspicion of
being unsafe.

And yet, as I have said, Brooklyn is rather a condition than a concrete
fact. I believe every great Babylon has its neighbouring Brooklyn.
London has it; Boston has it; Paris has it; even Chicago has it. And the
line of demarcation between what is Brooklyn and what is not Brooklyn is
not always a sharp one. There are many people in Manhattan who at heart
are residents of Brooklyn. Such people, though they live in Harlem,
avoid the express trains in the Subway on account of the crush. They
visit the Museum of Natural History on Sunday and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art on legal holidays and extraordinary occasions. They cross
the Hudson and walk on the Palisades. They bring librettos to the opera
and read them in the dark, thus missing a great deal of what passes on
the stage. On the other hand, you will find people in Brooklyn whose
spirit is totally alien to the place. They want to boost Brooklyn and
boom it and push it and make it the most important borough in Greater
New York, and develop its harbour facilities, and establish a great
university, and double the assessed value of real estate within five
years. Such people are in Brooklyn, but not of it.

And that is why Brooklyn has so strong a hold on me. I like it because
it has so many wonderful, valuable, common things in it. In Brooklyn
there are people, churches, baby-carriages, bay-windows, butchers' boys
carrying baskets and whistling, policemen who misdirect strangers,
vacant lots where boys play baseball, small tradesmen, overhead
trolleys, quiet streets tucked away between parallel lines of clanging
elevated railway, an Institute of Arts, and old gentlemen who write
letters to the newspapers. I like Brooklyn because it hasn't the highest
anything, or the biggest anything, or the richest anything in the
world.

XIV

PALLADINO OUTDONE

Harding spent one long winter night in reading the report of a select
committee of the Society for Psychical Recreation which placed on record
no less than half a dozen absolutely authenticated cases of material
objects being moved through space by some mysterious agency other than
physical. The report, as it took shape in Harding's dreams that night,
was as follows: