which decorated his little coat; "and I see that you are head boy!"

"M. Charles helps me to learn, and so I am come to be the first in the class."

"Are you now going to your lessons?"

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Yes, and he has given me some lilacs; for he has a garden where we play together, and which furnishes flowers to my mother."

"Then it is the same as if it were partly your own."

"So it is! Ah! they are good neighbors indeed! But here I am; good-by, sir."

He nodded to me with a smile, and disappeared.

I went on with my walk, still pensive, but with a feeling of relief. If I had elsewhere witnessed the painful contrast between affluence and want, here I had found the true union of riches and poverty. Good will had smoothed down the more rugged inequalities on both sides, and had opened a road of true neighborhood between the humble workshop and the stately mansion. Instead of hearkening to the voice of interest, each had listened to that of self-sacrifice, and there was no place left for contempt or envy. Thus, instead of the beggar in rags, that I had seen at the other door cursing the rich man, I had found here the happy child of the laborer loaded with flowers and blessing him! The problem, so difficult and so dangerous to examine into, with no regard but for the rights of it, I had just seen solved by love.

[WILLIAM CRARY BROWNELL: An American essayist and editor; born in New York city, August 30, 1851. He was graduated from Amherst College, and entered journalism in his native city, becoming editor of Scribner's Magazine. He has published: "French Traits" (1889), French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture" (1892), and "Newport," in the "American Summer Resorts" Series (1896).]

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THERE is no palpable New York in the sense in which there is a Paris, a Vienna, a Milan. You can touch it at no point. It is not even ocular. There is instead a Fifth Avenue, a Broadway, a Central Park, a Chatham Square. How they have dwindled, by the way. Fifth Avenue might be any one of a dozen London streets in the first impression it makes on the retina and leaves on the mind. The opposite side of Madison Square is but a step away. The spacious hall of the Fifth Avenue Hotel has shrunk to stifling proportions. Thirty-fourth Street is a lane; the City Hall a bandbox; the Central Park a narrow strip of elegant landscape, whose lateral limitations are constantly forced upon the sense by the Lenox Library on one side and a monster apartment house on the other. The American fondness for size for pure bigness needs explanation, it appears; we care for size, but inartistically; we care nothing for proportion, which is what makes size count. Everything is on the same scale: there is no play, no movement. An exception should be made in favor of the big business building and the apartment house which have arisen within a few years, and which have greatly accentuated the grotesqueness of the city's sky line as seen from either the New Jersey or the Long Island shore. They are perhaps rather high than big; many of them were built before the authorities noticed them and followed unequally in the steps of other civilized municipal governments, from that of ancient Rome down, in prohibiting the passing of a fixed limit. But bigness has also evidently been one of their architectonic motives, and it is to be remarked that they are so far out of scale with the surrounding buildings as to avoid the usual commonplace only by creating a positively disagreeable

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· Copyright, 1893, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Used by permission.