with their ponies, as the elders were in their different mounts, remains
to distract the eye from the occupants of the two rows of penny chairs
and the promenaders between them.

It was a less formidable but possibly more interesting show of what
seemed society at home than the Sunday-afternoon reception in the
consecrated closes on the grass. People who knew one another stopped and
gossiped, and people who knew nobody passed on and tried to ignore them.
But that could not have been easy. The women whom those handsome,
aristocratic men bowed over, or dropped into chairs beside, or saluted
as they went by, were very beautiful women, and dressed with that
sentiment which has already been celebrated. Their draperies fluttered
in the gay breeze which vied with the brilliant sun in dappling them
with tremulous leaf-shadows, and in making them the life of a picture to
be seen nowhere else. It was not necessary to know just who, or just of
what quality they were, in order to realize their loveliness.

Behind the walks and under the trees the grass had still something of
its early summer freshness; but in its farther stretches it was of our
August brown, and in certain spaces looked burned to the roots. The
trees themselves had begun to relax their earlier vigor, and the wind
blew showers of yellowing leaves from their drooping boughs. Towards the
close of the season, on the withered grass, quite in the vicinity of
those consecrated social closes, to which I am always returning with a
snobbish fondness, I saw signs of the advance of the great weary army
which would possess the pleasure-grounds of the town when the pleasurers
had left it. Already the dead-tired, or possibly the dead-drunk, had
cast themselves, as if they had been shot down there, with their faces
in the lifeless grass, and lay in greasy heaps and coils where the
delicate foot of fashion had pressed the green herbage. As among the