Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-06.pdf/121

114 sioners of our lordly estate will at once proceed to lay down horse-car tracks, inviting, encouraging and paying if necessary any and all horse-car companies to send over it open railway carriages, the workingman's wife and baby can enjoy the scenery and the gayety, coming home to daily duties refreshed. There are possibly not more than one thousand who keep mere pleasure horses in the city, whilst there are six hundred and ninety-nine thousand who seldom ride behind any but the car horse. Let the six hundred and ninety-nine thousand have a chance to get exhilaration and health by breathing just such air as invigorates the minority. Let the enjoyment of the six hundred and ninety-nine thousand, the masses for whom King James had the Bible translated, be the special point kept in view by the Park Commissioners.

It would be in vain for the warmest supporters of our expensive Park to deny that the citizens who live at a distance do not reap the benefit and pleasure which the Park grounds might afford. The taxes for improvements may touch them lightly, but the inhabitants of Kensington and Richmond have no means of easy access to its lovely precincts, nor can they reach the drives except through great fatigue and loss of time. We would like to see them participate in the benefit. The Reading Railroad managers, always anxious to identify themselves with the interests of their fellow-citizens, might, and we trust will, run over their admirably-managed road a few daily passenger trains to connect with the "Park Accommodation," so that a painful and fatiguing route through the city could be reduced to a short, pleasant and inexpensive trip to the health-inspiring beauties now created and in progress. Let the Commissioners and the railroad directors have five minutes' conference, and the suggestion will be found of advantage to both parties, but especially to the public. The need and the popularity of the proposed trains all who make an examination of the map will at once see: it would bring new advocates for great expenditures, reconciling some unheard, though influential, parties. It is the business and right of the press to suggest: let those interested weigh and act.

I am an old woman, Mr. Editor (writes a friend for whose communication we gladly make room in this department of the Magazine), but I am not in the least conservative after the manner of my kind. I have a weakness for the ways and fashions of the hour, and can smile cheerfully upon my eldest granddaughter when she appears before me crêpée, panierée and flounced to the height of the mode. She looks pretty, and I confess the fact. As long as she neither paints her face nor dyes her hair I can see no harm in her dainty and fantastic attire. Girls did not dress so in my day, to be sure. But then, in my day steamboats were scarce, and railroads and telegraphs were not. I should as soon yearn after a journey by stage-coach and canal-boat as to desire to see the young girls of the period attired in calico, with their hair combed tightly over their ears. Nor did I ever dress in that simple, be-praised and unæsthetic fashion myself. The mute evidence of my portrait, painted when I was just twenty-two, proves to me that I wore a black silk dress, a lace cape and sundry articles of jewelry, and that I built up my hair into a most astonishing edifice of puffs and bows, three times more difficult to construct than a modern chignon would be. I like the charming little concoctions of lace and ribbons and flowers which we call bonnets, and which replace the satin cartwheels of my girlhood. I like duplex elliptics, and do not sigh after the days when a fashionable lady could with difficulty step across a gutter by reason of the narrowness of her skirts. I like street-cars and railroads and tele graphs and gas-lamps and furnace fires. I took laughing-gas the other day to have a tooth extracted. I paid forty dollars last month for a new chignon (gray hairs being expensive, you see); and I must own that I think the dress