DARBY REVISITED
The Soothsayer owns a car, and tools passionately about the country, revisiting the vistas and glimpses that he thinks particularly lovely. But he is a stubborn partisan of such beauty spots as he has himself discovered, and bitterly reluctant to concede any glamour to places he hasn't visited. For a long time he has heard us raving about Darby creek, and always asserted furiously that we had never seen a certain road up Norristown way that was (he said) a far, far better thing than any place we would be likely to know about. But the other evening, somewhat stirred by our piteous babble about the old cider mill we hadn't visited for ten years, he got out his 'bus and we set forth.
We went out along the West Chester pike, and the manner of the Soothsayer was subtly supercilious. All the way out from Sixty-ninth street the road is in bad condition, and as he nursed his handsome vehicle over the bumps we could see that the Soothsayer thought (though too polite to say so) that we were leading him into a very bedraggled and ill-assorted region. Another very sinister rebuke was that he had left up the canopy top over the car, although it was a serene and lucid evening, flushed with quiet sunset. This seemed to imply that any tract of country we would lead him to would hardly be worth examining carefully. As we passed by the university astronomical obser-
