) It is good
work, though; and upon the whole, the Park force members like it.
They see life, and the excitement keeps them up. There is not so much
difficulty as might be supposed from tramps, roughs, or in keeping
people "off the grass." The worst trouble of the regular Park employe
is from malarial fever, chills, and the like.
A FINE AFTERNOON, 4 TO 6
Ten thousand vehicles careering through the Park this perfect
afternoon. Such a show! and I have seen all--watch'd it narrowly,
and at my leisure. Private barouches, cabs and coupes, some fine
horseflesh--lapdogs, footmen, fashions, foreigners, cockades on hats,
crests on panels--the full oceanic tide of New York's wealth and
"gentility." It was an impressive, rich, interminable circus on a
grand scale, full of action and color in the beauty of the day, under
the clear sun and moderate breeze. Family groups, couples, single
drivers--of course dresses generally elegant--much "style," (yet
perhaps little or nothing, even in that direction, that fully
justified itself.) Through the windows of two or three of the richest
carriages I saw faces almost corpse-like, so ashy and listless. Indeed
the whole affair exhibited less of sterling America, either in
spirit or countenance, than I had counted on from such a select
mass-spectacle. I suppose, as a proof of limitless wealth, leisure,
and the aforesaid "gentility," it was tremendous. Yet what I saw those
hours (I took two other occasions, two other afternoons to watch
the same scene,) confirms a thought that haunts me every additional
glimpse I get of our top-loftical general or rather exceptional phases
of wealth and fashion in this country--namely, that they are ill at
ease, much too conscious, cased in too many cerements, and far from
happy--that there is nothing in them which we who are poor and plain
need at all envy, and that instead of the perennial smell of the
grass and woods and shores, their typical redolence is of soaps and
essences, very rare may be, but suggesting the barber shop--something
that turns stale and musty in a few hours anyhow.
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