raight, for the time, in
the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island. The lights of
the great Garden were out; the benches in the Square were filled with
sleepers in postures so strange that beside them the writhing figures
in Dore's illustrations of the Inferno would have straightened into
tailor's dummies. The statue of Diana on the tower of the Garden--its
constancy shown by its weathercock ways, its innocence by the coating
of gold that it has acquired, its devotion to style by its single,
graceful flying scarf, its candour and artlessness by its habit of
ever drawing the long bow, its metropolitanism by its posture of swift
flight to catch a Harlem train--remained poised with its arrow pointed
across the upper bay. Had that arrow sped truly and horizontally it
would have passed fifty feet above the head of the heroic matron whose
duty it is to offer a cast-ironical welcome to the oppressed of other
lands.

Seaward this lady gazed, and the furrows between steamship lines began
to cut steerage rates. The translators, too, have put an extra burden
upon her. "Liberty Lighting the World" (as her creator christened
her) would have had a no more responsible duty, except for the size
of it, than that of an electrician or a Standard Oil magnate. But to
"enlighten" the world (as our learned civic guardians "Englished" it)
requires abler qualities. And so poor Liberty, instead of having a
sinecure as a mere illuminator, must be converted into a Chautauqua
schoolma'am, with the oceans for her field instead of the placid,
classic lake. With a fireless torch and an empty head must she dispel
the shadows of the world and teach it its A, B, C's.

"Ah, there, Mrs. Liberty!" called a clear, rollicking soprano voice
through the still, midnight air.

"Is that you, Miss Diana? Excuse my not turning my head. I'm not as
flighty and whirly-whirly as some. And 'tis so hoarse I am I can
hardly talk on account of the peanut-hulls left on the stairs in me
throat by that last boatload of tourists from Marietta, Ohio. 'Tis
after being a fine evening, miss."

"If you don't mind my asking," came the bell-like tones of the golden
statue, "I'd like to know where you got that City Hall brogue. I
didn't know that Liberty was necessarily Irish."

"If ye'd studied the history of art in its foreign complications
ye'd not need to ask," replied the offshore statue. "If ye wasn't
so light-headed and giddy ye'd know that I was made by a Dago