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"He squeezed my hand and answered, 'What a child it is, indeed!" said Henriette. It was a bright, sunny morning in the early summer when Henriette, gazing out of the dining-room windows across the lawns adjoining the Rockerbilt place, caught sight of a number of ragamuffins at play there. "Who are those little tatterdemalions, Bunny?" she asked, with a suggestion of a frown upon her brow.
The academy opened from its front upon its own gardens, lawns, shrubberies, and other pleasure-grounds, the resort of its pupils during their hours of recreation.
"Had Loch Lomond been in a happier climate, it would have been the boast of wealth and vanity to own one of the little spots which it incloses, and to have employed upon it all the arts of embellishment. But as it is, the islets which court the gazer at a distance, disgust him at his approach, when he finds instead of soft lawns and shady thickets, nothing more than uncultivated ruggedness."
It gave one a fine shiver of exclusion as populace, or mob, to look through their barriers at children playing on the lawns within, while their nurses sat reading, or pushed perambulators over the trim walks. Sometimes it was even young ladies who sat reading, or, at the worst, governesses.
But some impulse told him to turn to the right, and he began to wander westward along the edge of the cliffs always on his left hand, space and the sea, and on his right, lawns or gardens or parapets crowned by cactus plants in urns, and behind these a great variety of houses French chateaux and marble palaces and nice little white cottages, and, finally, a frowning Gothic castle.
"A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged, Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged." I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the inaugurator of an age of prose and reason. Do you ask me whether Pope's verse, take it almost where you will, is not good? "To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down; Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own."
As he paced up and down the lawns, the gold cross at his breast gleamed in the evening light. A night-hawk, flying high overhead and looking downward as it flew, might have supposed that a great scarlet poppy had left its clump in the flower-beds, and was promenading on the turf. A steward came out to ask when it would please the Lord Bishop to sup.
'Blessin's on the man that invented it, says I, 'and put folks in the notion of havin' their lawns kept neat, 'cause they could do it cheap. And there's what Andy and Jim has made a-drivin' the cows, and Barney and Tommie a-takin' care of the geese. Wennott's the town for them as can work. And bad luck to lazy bones anyway. It's thankful I am I've got none of 'em in my family."
A double row of big soft maples met over it, and shaded the sidewalk and part of the wide lawns. The grass was fresh and green. Houses with capacious verandas on which were glimpsed easy chairs and hammocks, sent forth a mild glow from a silk-shaded lamp or two.
When one has had time to dissect the great town, appreciation is keener; there are several Brightons; there is a town built on a cliff, another with spacious lawns on the sea level, and a third, the old Brighton, bounded by the limits of the original fishing village, and, with all its brilliance, having a distinctly briny smell as of fish markets and tarred rope and sun-baked seaweed when you are near the shingle.
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