fixtures which adorns the show window of at least one plumber's shop
in every American town--we missed. The bathtub is not a household
need in France. Yet some way we surmised that if our towns could
have better bookstores and fewer bathtubs we might have felt easier
in our minds for the palladiums of our liberties. And it can't be
laid to the picture shows--this slump in the American book reading
average; for the French towns are just as full of picture shows
as American towns. That superiority in bookstores which lies with
the French over the Americans, should give us pause. It more than
overbalances our superiority in country newspapers. And then as
we walked about the town that evening in the sunset pondering upon
these things we came to the town park.

It was not a large park; but it lay close down to the main street--"right
in the heart of the city," we would say at home. Everyone in town
who moved about, to the stores from the residential streets, had to
pass through that park. In it were certain long rows of grey-barked
trees--trees with trunks that shimmered like the trunks of sycamores,
but that rose sheer from the ground forty feet before branching,
and then spread widely and calmly into mighty sprays of foliage.
One could not walk under those trees day after day and year after
year through life and not feel their spell upon his heart. "From
the old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in the
heaven," to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhaps
more or less sordid routine, must inevitably come "the thought
of boundless power and inaccessible majesty!" And that is a good
thought to keep in the heart. That grove in the midst of that little
French town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a daily
newspaper, more than a trolley line or a convention hall. For it
called incessantly to men a mute inexorable summons to the things