This group is always a great pleasure to me, from whatever point I come
upon it, or catch a glimpse of it; and I like to go and find the dog’s
prototype in the wolves at the menagerie which the city offers free to
the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging its grounds and houses.
The captive brutes seem to be of that solidarity of good-fellowship
which unites all the frequenters of the Park; the tigers and the
stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me from tigers and
lions shown for profit. Among the milder sorts, I do not care so much
for the wallowing hippopotamuses, and the lumbering elephants, and
the supercilious camels which one sees in menageries everywhere, as
for those types which represent a period as extinct as that of the
American pioneers; I have rather a preference for going and musing
upon the ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths open
at the pale of their paddock, expecting the children’s peanuts, and
unconscious of their importance as survivors of the untold millions
of their kind which a quarter of a century ago blackened the Western
plains for miles and miles. There are now only some forty or fifty
left; for of all the forces of our plutocratic conditions, so few are
conservative that the American buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned
American mechanic, proud of his independence, and glorying in his
citizenship.
In some other enclosures are pairs of beautiful deer, which I wish
might be enlarged to the whole extent of the Park. But I can only
imagine them on the great sweeps of grass, which recall the savannahs
and prairies, though there is a very satisfactory flock of sheep which
nibbles the herbage there, when these spaces are not thrown open to the
ball-players who are allowed on certain days of the week. I like to
watch them, and so do great numbers of other frequenters of the Park,
apparently; and when I have walked far up beyond the reservoirs of
city-water, which serve the purpose of natural lakes in the landscape,
I like to come upon that expanse in the heart of the woods where the
tennis-players have stretched their nets over a score of courts, and
the art students have set up their easels on the edges of the lawns,
for what effect of the autumnal foliage they have the luck or the skill
to get. It is all very sweet and friendly, and in keeping with the
purpose of the Park, and its frank and simple treatment throughout.