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.  Joan of Arc, poised on horseback against her screen of dark cedars, held her sword clearly against the pale sky.  Amazingly sure and strong and established seem the rich facades of Riverside Drive apartment houses, and the landlords were rolling in limousines up to Claremont to have lunch.  One small apartment house, near Eighty-third or thereabouts, has been renamed the Chateau-Thierry.

After crossing the long bridge above Claremont and the deep ravine where ships and ferryboats and coal stations abound, the bus crosses on 135th Street to Broadway.  At 153d, the beautiful cemetery of Trinity Parish, leafy paths lying peaceful in the strong glow.  At 166th Street is an open area now called Mitchel Square, with an outcrop of rock polished by the rearward breeks of many sliding urchins.  Some children were playing on that small summit with a toy parachute made of light paper and a pebble attached by threads.  On 168th Street alongside the big armoury of the Twenty-second Engineers boys were playing baseball, with a rubber ball, pitching it so that the batter received it on the bounce and struck it with his fist.  According to the score chalked on the pavement the “Bronx Browns” and the “Haven Athletics” were just finishing a rousing contest, in which the former were victors, 1-0.  Haven Avenue, near by, is a happy little street perched high above the river.  A small terraced garden with fading flowers looks across the Hudson to the woody Palisades.  Modest apartment houses are built high on enormous buttresses, over the steep scarp of the hillside.  Through cellar windows coal was visible, piled high in the bins; children were trooping home for dinner; a fine taint of frying onions hung in the shining air.  Everywhere in that open, half-suburban, comfortable region was a feeling of sane, established life.  An old man with a white beard was greeted by two urchins, who ran up and kissed him heartily as he beamed upon them.  Grandpa, one supposes!  Plenty of signs indicating small apartments to rent, four and five rooms.  And down that upper slant of Broadway, as the bus bumbles past rows of neat prosperous-seeming shops, one feels the great tug and pulling current of life that flows down the channel, the strange energy of the huge city lying below.  The tide was momentarily stilled, but soon to resume action.  There was a magic touch apparent, like the stillness of a palace in a fairy tale, bewitched into waiting silence.