woodland height running down to
a broad low strip, whose westernmost boundary was the railroad
embankment, beyond which lay the broad blue Hudson, with Fort Lee and
the first up-springing of the Palisades, to be seen by glimpses through
the tree-trunks. This was, I think, the prettiest piece of
flower-spangled wildwood that I have ever seen. For centuries it had
drained the richness of that long and lofty ridge. The life of lawns and
gardens had gone into it; the dark wood-soil had been washed from out
the rocks on the brow of the hill; and down below there, where a vagrom
brooklet chirped its way between green stones, the wholesome soil
bloomed forth in grateful luxuriance. From the first coming of the
anemone and the hepatica, to the time of the asters, there was always
something growing there to delight the scent or the sight; and most of
all do I remember the huge clumps of Dutchman's-breeches--the purple
and the waxy white as well as the honey-tipped scarlet.

[Illustration]

There were little sunlit clearings here, and I well recall the day when,
looking across one of these, I saw something that stood awkwardly and
conspicuously out of the young wood-grass--a raw stake of pine wood,
and beyond that, another stake, and another; and parallel with these
another row, marking out two straight lines, until the bushes hid them.
The surveyors had begun to lay out the line of the new Boulevard, on
which you may now roll in your carriage to Inwood, through the wreck of
the woods where I used to scramble over rock and tree-trunk, going
toward Tubby Hook.

It was on the grayest of gray November days last year that I had the
unhappy thought of revisiting this love of my youth. I followed
familiar trails, guided by landmarks I could not forget--although they
had somehow grown incredibly poor and mean and shabby, and had entirely
lost a certain dignity that they had until then kept quite clearly in my
remembrance. And behold, they were no longer landmarks except to me. A
change had come over the face of this old playground of mine. It had
forgotten the withered, modest grace of the time when it was
middle-aged, and when I was a boy. It was checkered and gridironed with
pavements and electric lights. The Elevated Railroad roared at its doors
behind clouds of smoke and steam. Great, cheerless, hideously ornate
flat buildings reared their zinc-tipped fronts toward the gray heaven,
to show the highest aspirations of that demorali