" To the Messrs. Drake we mentioned
the interesting letter of Mr. J. Acton Lomax in yesterday's
_Tribune_, which called attention to the fact that the poem at the
end of "Through the Looking Glass" is an acrostic giving the name of
the original Alice--viz., Alice Pleasance Liddell. In return for
which we were shown a copy of the first edition of "Alice in
Wonderland." Here, too, we dallied for some time over a first
edition of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, and were pleased to learn that
the great doctor was no more infallible in proofreading than the
rest of us, one of our hosts pointing out to us a curious error by
which some words beginning in COV had slipped in ahead of words
beginning in COU.
* * * * *
At noon to-day we climbed on a Riverside Drive bus at Seventy-ninth
Street and rode in the mellow gold of autumn up to Broadway and
168th. Serene, gilded weather; sunshine as soft and tawny as
candlelight, genial at midday as the glow of an open fire in spite
of the sharpness of the early morning. Battleships lay in the river
with rippling flags. Men in flannels were playing tennis on the
courts below Grant's Tomb; everywhere was a convincing appearance of
comfort and prosperity. The beauty of the children, the good
clothing of everybody, canes swinging on the pavements, cheerful
faces untroubled by thought, the warm benevolence of sunlight,
bronzing trees along Riverside Park, a man reading a book on the
summit of that rounded knoll of rock near Eighty-fourth Street which
children call "Mount Tom"--everything was so bright in life and
vigour that the sentence seems to need no verb.
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