quite as far
as in Central Park. Between Boston and Portsmouth there were bits of
railroad bank that were as green as the sward beside the Mall, and every
now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the wet lowlands that
hung the air as full of color as any maple that reddened the flying
landscape when I first got beyond the New York suburbs on my way north.
At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same songs as in the Park. I
could not make out the slightest difference."

"With the same note of nervous apprehension in them?"

"I did not observe that. But they were spring songs, certainly."

"Then," the Easy Chair said, "I would rather my winter were turned into
summer, or early autumn, than spring, if there is going to be any change
of the mortal conditions. I like settled weather, the calm of that time
of life when the sins and follies have been committed, the passions
burned themselves out, and the ambitions frustrated so that they do not
bother, the aspirations defeated, the hopes brought low. Then you have
some comfort. This turmoil of vernal striving makes me tired."

"Yes, I see what you mean," the poet assented. "But you cannot have the
seasons out of their order in the rearrangement of the mortal
conditions. You must have spring and you must have summer before you can
have autumn."

"Are those the terms? Then I say, Winter at once! Winter is bad enough,
but I would not go through spring again for any--In winter you can get
away from the cold, with a good, warm book, or a sunny picture, or a
cozy old song, or a new play; but in spring how will you escape the
rawness if you have left off your flannels and let out the furnace? No,
my dear friend, we could not stand going back to youth every year. The
trees can, because they have been used to it from the beginning of time,
but the men could not. Even the women----"

At this moment a beatific presence made itself sensible, and the Easy
Chair recognized the poet's Muse, who had come for him. The poet put the
question to her. "Young?" she said. "Why, you and I are _always_ young,
silly boy! Get your hat, and come over to Long Island City with me, and
see the pussy-willows along the railroad-banks. The mosquitoes are
beginning to sing in the ditches already."

III

SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES

The other day one of those convertible familiars of the Easy Chair, who

"Change and pass and come again,"

looked in upon it, after some months' absence,