ABSTRACT
The older man could not sleep well. He was bedeviled, and had been for over a year, by a disagreement with the commissioners of the New York public parks. He tried to while away night hours by writing fragmen tary recollections of his childhood, youth, and of the beginnings of Central Park twenty years before, but he found himself enmeshed in old bitternesses. From his childhood floated back to him the still inexplicable way his father had had of sending a small, shy boy away to country schools where more than once he was as badly treated as any defenseless child in one of Dickens's stories. He remembered the aimless wanderings and wastages of his youth which had yet permitted him to learn to love the lines of nature. He re called, and choked upon the ugliness of some of the resentments he had encountered when he went to work for Central Park under the jealous Viele.
