THERE is pretty good snipe shooting within the city limits of New York, and I have heard that an occasional trout still rises to the fly in one or two spots along a certain stream—which need not be made better known than it is already, though it can hardly be worth whipping much longer at any rate.

A great many ducks, however, are still shot every season in the city, by those who know where to go for them; and as for inferior sport, like rabbits—if you include them as game—on certain days of the year probably more gunners and dogs are out after rabbits within the limits of Greater New York than in any region of equal extent in the world, though to be sure the bags brought in hardly compare with those of certain parts of Australia or some of our Western States. Down toward Far Rockaway, a little this side of the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay, in the hedges and cabbage-patches of the "truck" farms, there is plenty of good cover for rabbits, as well as in the brush-piles and pastures of the rolling Borough of Richmond on Staten Island, and the forests and stone fences of the hilly Bronx, up around Pelham Bay Park for instance. But the gunners must keep out of the parks, of course, though many ubiquitous little boys with snares do not.

In such parts of the city, except when No Trespassing signs prevent, on any day of the open season scores of men and youths may be seen whose work and homes are generally in the densest parts of the city, respectable citizens from the extreme east and west sides of Manhattan, artisans and clerks, salesmen and small shopkeepers, who, quite unexpectedly in some cases, share the ancient fret and longing of the primitive man in common with those other New Yorkers who can go farther out on Long Island or farther up into New York State to satisfy it. To be sure, the former do not get as many shots as the latter, but they get the outdoors and the exercise and the return to nature, which is the main thing. And the advantage of going shooting in Greater New York is that you can tramp until too dark to see, and yet get back in time to dine at home, thus satisfying an appetite acquired in the open with a dinner cooked in the city.

Once a certain young family went off to a far corner of Greater New York to attack the perennial summer problem. By walking through a hideously suburban village with a beautifully rural name they found, just over the brow of a hill, quite as a friend had told them they would, tucked away all alone in a green glade beside an ancient forest, a charming little diamond-paned, lattice-windowed cottage, covered thick with vines outside, and yet supplied with modern plumbing within. It seemed too good to be true. There was no distinctly front yard or back yard, not even a public road in sight, and no neighbors to bother them except the landlord, who lived in the one house near by and was very agreeable. All through the close season they enjoyed the whistling of quail at their breakfast; in their afternoon walks, squirrels and rabbits and uncommon song-birds were too common to be remarked; and once, within forty yards of the house, great consternation was caused by a black snake, though it was not black snakes but mosquitoes that made them look elsewhere next year, and taught them a life-lesson in regard to English lattice-windows and American mosquito-screens.

But until the mosquitoes became so persistent it seemed—this country-place within a city, or rus in urbe, as they probably enjoyed calling it—an almost perfect solution of the problem for a small family whose head had to be within commuting distance of down-town. For though so remote, it was not inaccessible; two railroads and a trolley line were just over the dip of the hill that hid them, so that there was time for the young man of the house to linger with his family at breakfast, which was served out-of-doors, with no more objectionable witnesses than the thrushes in the hedges. And then, too, there was time to get exercise in the afternoon before dinner. "It seemed an ideal spot," to quote their account of it, "except that on our walks, just as we thought that we had found some sequestered dell where nobody had come since the Indians left, we would be pretty sure to hear a slight rustle behind us, and there—not an Indian but a Tammany policeman would break through the thicket, with startling white gloves and gleaming brass buttons, looking exactly like the policemen in the Park. Of course he would continue on his beat and disappear in a moment, but by that time we had forgotten to listen to the birds and things, and the distant hum of the trolley would break in and remind us of all things we have wanted to forget."

I

In a way, that is rather typical of most of the rurality found within the boundaries of these modern aggregations or trusts of large and small towns, and intervening country, held together (more or less) by one name, under one municipal government, and called a "city" by legislature. There is plenty that is not at all city-like within the city walls—called limits—there is plenty of nature, but in most cases those wanting to commune with it are reminded that it is no longer within the domain of nature. The city has stretched out its hand, and the mark of the beast can usually be seen.

You can find not only rural seclusion and bucolic simplicity, but the rudeness and crudeness of the wilderness and primeval forest; indeed, even forest fires have been known in Greater New York. But the trouble is that so often the bucolic simplicity has cleverly advertised lots staked out across it; the rural seclusion shows a couple of factory chimneys on the near horizon. The forest fire was put out by the fire department.

There are numerous peaceful duck-ponds in the Borough of Queens, for instance, as muddy and peaceful as ever you saw, but so many of them are lighted by gas every evening. Besides the fisheries, there is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections of this city; and in at least one place it can be seen by electric light. There are many potato-patches patrolled by the police.

Not far from the geographical centre of the city there are fields where, as all who have ever commuted to and from the north shore of Long Island must remember, German women may be seen every day in the tilling season, working away as industriously as the peasants of Europe, blue skirts, red handkerchiefs about their heads, and all: while not far away, at frequent intervals, passes a whining, thumping trolley-car, marked Brooklyn Bridge.

In another quarter, on a dreary, desolate waste, neither farm land, nor city, nor village, there stands an old weather-beaten hut, long, low, patched up and tumbled down, with an old soap-box for a front doorstep—all beautifully toned by time, the kind amateurs like to sketch, when found far away from home in their travels. The thing that recalls the city in this case, rather startlingly, is a rudely lettered sign, with the S's turned the wrong way, offering lots for sale in Greater New York.

It is not necessary to go far away from the beaten paths of travel in Greater New York to witness any of these scenes of the comedy, sometimes tragedy, brought about by the contending forces of city and country. Most of what has been cited can be observed from car-windows. For that matter, somewhat similar incongruity can be found in all of our modern, legally enlarged cities, London, with the hedges and gardens of Hampstead Heath, and certain parts of the Surrey Side, or Chicago, with its broad stretches of prairie and farms—the subject of so many American newspaper jokes a few years ago.

But New York—and this is another respect in which it is different from other cities—our great Greater New York, which is better known as having the most densely populated tenement districts in the world, can show places that are more truly rural than any other city of modern times, places where the town does not succeed in obtruding itself at all. From Hampstead Heath, green and delightful as it is, every now and then the gilded cross of St. Paul's may be seen gleaming far below through the trees. And in Chicago, bucolic as certain sections of it may be, one can spy the towers of the city for miles away, across the prairie; even when down in certain wild, murderous-looking ravines there is ever on high the appalling cloud of soft-coal smoke. But out in the broad, rolling farm lands of Long Island you can walk on for hours and not find any sign of the city you are in, except the enormous tax-rate, which, by the way, has the effect of discouraging the farmers (many of whom did not want to become city people at all) from spending money for paint and improvements, and this only results in making the country look more primitive, and less like what is absurdly called a city.

But the best of these rural parts of town cannot be spied from car-windows, or the beaten paths of travel.

II

Make a journey out through the open country to the southeast of Flushing, past the Oakland Golf Club, and over toward the Creedmoor Rifle Range, after a while turn north and follow a twisting road that leads down into the ravine at the head of Little Neck Bay, where a few of the many Little Neck clams come from. All of these places are well within the eastern boundary of the city, and this little journey will furnish a very good example of a certain kind of rural New York, but only one kind, for it is only one small corner of a very big place.

As soon as you have ridden, or walked—it is better to walk if there is plenty of time—beyond the fine elms of the ancient Flushing streets, you will be in as peaceful looking farming country as can be found anywhere. But the interesting thing about it is that here are seen not merely a few incongruous green patches that happen to be left between rapidly devouring suburban towns—like the fields near Woodside where the German women work—out here one rides through acre after acre of it, farm after farm, mile after mile, up hill, down hill, corn-fields, wheat-fields, stone fences, rail fences, no fences, and never a town in sight, much less anything to suggest the city, except the procession of market-wagons at certain hours, to or from College Point Ferry, and they aren't so conspicuously urban after all.

Even the huge advertising sign-boards which usually shout to passers-by along the approaches to cities are rather scarce in this country, for it is about midway between two branches of the only railroad on Long Island, and there is no need for a trolley. There is nothing but country roads, with more or less comfortable farm-houses and large, squatty barns; not only old farm-houses, but what is much more striking, farm-houses that are new. Now, it does seem odd to build a new farm-house in a city.

Out in the fields the men are ploughing. A rooster crows in the barn-yard. A woman comes out to take in the clothes. Children climb the fence to gaze when people pass by. And one can ride for a matter of miles and see no other kind of life, except the birds in the hedge and an occasional country dog, not suburban dogs, but distinctly farm dogs, the kind that have deep, ominous barks, as heard at night from a distance. By and by, down the dusty, sunny, lane-like road plods a fat old family Dobbin, pulling an old-fashioned phaËton in which are seated a couple of prim old maiden ladies, dressed in black, who try to make him move faster in the presence of strangers, and so push and jerk animatedly on the reins, which he enjoys catching with his tail, and holds serenely until beyond the bend in the road.

Of course, this is part of the city. The road map proves it. But there are very few places along this route where you can find it out in any other way. The road leads up over a sort of plateau; a wide expanse of country can be viewed in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. And over there, more to the west, is dreary East New York and endless Brooklyn, and dirty Long Island City, and, still farther, crowded Manhattan Island itself. Then one realizes something of the extent of this strange manner of city. It is very ridiculous.

When at last the head of Little Neck Bay is reached, here is another variety of primitive country scene. The upland road skirting the hill, beyond which the rifles of Creedmoor are crashing, takes a sudden turn down a steep grade, a guileless-looking grade, but very dangerous for bicyclists, especially in the fall when the ruts and rocks are covered thick with leaves for days at a time. Then, after passing a nearer view (through a vista of big trees) of the blue Sound, with the darker blue of the hills beyond, the road drops down into a peaceful old valley, tucked away as serene and unmolested as it was early in the nineteenth century, when the country cross-roads store down there was first built, along-side of the water-power mill, which is somewhat older. In front is an old dam and mill-pond, called "The Alley," recently improved, but still containing black bass; in the rear Little Neck Bay opens out to the Sound beyond, one of the sniping and ducking places of Greater New York. The old store, presumably the polling-place of that election district of the city, is where prominent personages of the neighborhood congregate and tell fishing and shooting stories, and gossip, and talk politics, seated on boxes and barrels around the white-bodied stove, for the sake of which they chew tobacco.

It is one of those stores that contain everything—from anchor-chains to chewing-gum. There are bicycle sundries in the show-case and boneless bacon suspended from the old rafters, but the best thing in the place is a stream of running water. This is led down by a pipe from the side of the hill, acts as a refrigerator for a sort of bar in one corner of the store—for this establishment sells a greater variety of commodities than most department stores—and passes out into Long Island Sound in the rear.

The fact that they are in Greater New York does not seem to bother them much down in this happy valley, at least it hasn't changed their mode of life apparently. The last time we were there a well-tanned Long Islander was buying some duck loads; he said he was merely going out after a few snipe, but he ordered No. 5's.

"Have you a policeman out here?" we asked him.

"Oh, yes, but he doesn't come around very often."

"How often?"

"Oh, I generally catch a glimpse of him once a month or so," said the gunner. "But then, you see, these here city policemen have to be pretty careful, they're likely to get lost."

"Down near Bay Ridge," a man on the cracker-barrel put in as he stroked the store-cat, "one night a policeman got off his beat and floundered into the swamp, and if it hadn't been that some folks of the neighborhood rescued him, he'd have perished—of mosquitoes." "We don't have any mosquitoes here on the north shore," put in the other, addressing us without blinking. He is probably the humorist of the neighborhood.

This is only one of the many pilgrimages that may be made in Greater New York, and shows only one sort of rurality. It is the great variety of unurban scenes that is the most impressive thing about this city. Here is another sort, seen along certain parts of Jamaica Bay:

Long, level sweeps of flat land, covered with tall, wild grass that the sea-breezes like to race across. The plain is intersected here and there with streams of tide-water. At rare intervals there are lonely little clumps of scrub-oaks, huddled close together for comfort. Away off in the distance the yellow sand-dunes loom up as big as mountains, and beyond is the deep, thrilling blue of the open sea, with sharp-cut horizon.

The sun comes up, the wonderful color tricks of the early morning are exhibited, and the morning flight of birds begins. The tide comes hurrying in, soon hiding the mud flats where the snipe were feeding. The breeze freshens up, and whitecaps, like specks, can be seen on the distant blue band of the ocean.... The sun gets hot. The tide turns. The estuaries begin to show their mud-banks again. The sun sinks lower; and distant inlets reflect it brilliantly. The birds come back, the breeze dies down, and the sun sets splendidly across the long, flat plain; another day has passed over this part of a so-called city and no man has been within a mile of the spot. The nearest sign of habitation is the lonely life-saving station away over there on the dunes, and, perhaps, a fisherman's shanty. Far out on the sky-line is the smoke of a home-coming steamer, whose approach has already been announced from Fire Island, forty miles down the coast.

Then, here is another sort: A rambling, stony road, occasionally passing comfortable old houses—historic houses in some cases—with trees and lawns in front, leading down to stone walls that abut the road. The double-porticoed house where Aaron Burr died is not far from here. An old-fashioned, stone-arched bridge, a church steeple around the bend, a cluster of trees, and under them, a blacksmith shop. Trudging up the hill is a little boy, who stares and sniffles, carrying a slate and geography in one hand, and leading a little sister by the other, who also sniffles and stares. This, too, is Greater New York, Borough of Richmond, better known as Staten Island. This borough has nearly all kinds of wild and tame rurality and suburbanity. Its farms need not be described.

III

Pointing out mere farms in the city becomes rather monotonous; they are too common. But there is one kind of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient or modern times. It is situated, oddly enough, in about the centre of the 317 square miles of New York—so well as the centre of a boot-shaped area can be located.

Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City, which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets would have us believe; take the car marked "Steinway," and ride for fifteen or twenty minutes out through dreary city edge, past small, unpainted manufactories, squalid tenements, dirty backyards, and sad vacant lots that serve as the last resting-place for decayed trucks and overworked wagons. Soon after passing a tumble-down windmill, which looks like an historic old relic, on a hill-top, but which was built in 1867 and tumbled down only recently, the Steinway Silk Mills will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long, low wings of the building covered with windows like a hothouse). Leave the car here and strike off to the left, down the lane which will soon be an alley, and then a hundred yards or so from the highway will be seen the first of the odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese farmers who earn their living by tilling the soil of Greater New York.

At short distances are the other huts crouching at the foot of big trees, with queer gourds hanging out in front to dry, and large unusual crocks lying about, and huge baskets, and mattings—all clearly from China; they are as different from what could be bought on the neighboring avenue as the farm and farmers themselves are different from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the fields, which are tilled in the Oriental way, utilizing every inch of ground clean up to the fence, and laid out with even divisions at regular intervals, like rice-fields, the farmers themselves may be seen, working with Chinese implements, their pigtails tucked up under their straw hats, while the western world wags on in its own way all around them. This is less than five miles from the glass-covered parade-ground of the Waldorf-Astoria.

They have only three houses among them, that is, there are only three of these groups of rooms, made of old boards and boxes and covered with tar paper; but no one in the neighborhood seems to know just how many Chinamen live there. The same sleeping space would hold a score or more over in Pell Street. Being Chinamen, they grow only Chinese produce, a peculiar kind of bean and some sort of salad, and those large, artistic shaped melons, seen only in China or Chinatown, which they call something that sounds like "moncha," and which, one of them told me, bring two cents a pound from the Chinese merchants and restaurateurs of Manhattan. For my part, I was very glad to learn of these farms, for I had always been perplexed to account for the fresh salads and green vegetables, of unmistakably Chinese origin, that can be found in season in New York's Chinatown. Under an old shed near by they have their market-wagon, in which, looking inscrutable, they drive their stuff to market through Long Island City, and by way of James Slip Ferry over to Chinatown; then back to the farm again, looking inscrutable. And on Sundays, for all we know, they leave the wagon behind and go to gamble their earnings away in Mott Street, or perhaps away over in some of the well-known places of Jersey City. Then back across the two ferries to farming on dreary Monday mornings.

IV

Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up the Hudson to the mountains—a quiet, sequestered bit of public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up there every spring, and until quite recently so few people visited this spot for days at a time that there were sometimes woodcock and perhaps other game in the thickly wooded ravine by the railroad. Soon, however, the grass on the breastworks will be worn off entirely, and the aged deaf man who tends the river light on Jeffreys Hook will become sophisticated, if he is still alive.

It will take longer, however, for the regions to the north, beyond Washington Heights, down through Inwood and past Tubby Hook, to look like part of a city. And across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from Manhattan Island, up through the winding roads of Riverdale to Mount St. Vincent, and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still wooded, comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so many of the fine country places thereabouts are being deserted. Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful road which does not look like a part of the same thoroughfare as the one with actors and sky-scrapers upon it, there are the still wilder stretches of Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Park, where, a year or two ago, large, well-painted signs on the trees used to say "Beware of the Buffaloes."

The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to do with making this rural park more generally appreciated. Golf has done for Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done for the Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks. There are still natural, wild enough looking bits, off from the beaten paths, in all these parks, scenes that look delightfully dark and sylvan in the yearly thousands of amateur photographs—the camera does not show the German family approaching from the rear, or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes—but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a blossom.

V

Those who enjoy the study of all the forms of nature except the highest can find plenty to sigh over in the way the city thrusts itself upon the country. But to those who think that the haunts and habits of the Man are not less worthy of observation than those of the Beaver and the Skunk, it is all rather interesting, and some of it not so deeply deplorable.

There are certain old country taverns, here and there, up toward Westchester, and down beyond Brooklyn and over on Staten Island—not only those which everybody knows, like the Hermitage in the Bronx and Garrisons over by the fort at Willets Point, but remote ones which have not yet been exploited in plays or books, and which still have a fine old flavor, with faded prints of Dexter and Maud S. and much earlier favorites in the bar-room. In some cases, to be sure, though still situated at a country cross-roads, with green fields all about, they are now used for Tammany head-quarters with pictures of the new candidate for sheriff in the old-fashioned windows—but most of them would have gone out of existence entirely after the death of the stage-coach, if it had not been for the approach of the city, and the side-whiskered New Yorkers of a previous generation who drove fast horses. If the ghosts of these men ever drive back to lament the good old days together, they must be somewhat surprised, possibly disappointed, to find these rural road-houses doing a better business than even in their day. The bicycle revived the road-house, and though the bicycle has since been abandoned by those who prefer fashion to exercise, the places that the wheel disclosed are not forgotten. They are visited now in automobiles.

There are all those historic country-houses within the city limits, well known, and in some cases restored, chiefly by reason of being within the city, like the Van Cortlandt house, now a part of the park, and the Jumel mansion standing over Manhattan Field, a house which gets into most historical novels of New York. Similarly Claremont Park has adopted the impressive Zabriskie mansion; and the old Lorillard house in the Bronx might have been torn down by this time but that it has been made into a park house and restaurant. Nearly all these are tableted by the "patriotic" societies, and made to feel their importance. The Bowne place in Flushing, a very old type of Long Island farm-house, was turned into a museum by the Bowne family itself—an excellent idea. The Quaker Meeting-house in Flushing, though not so old by twenty-five years as it is painted in the sign which says "Built in 1695," will probably be preserved as a museum too.

Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the Duryea place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide window on the second floor, now shut in with a wooden cover supported by a long brace-pole reaching to the ground. Out of this window, it is said, a cannon used to point. This was while the house was head-quarters for Hessian officers, during the long monotonous months when "the main army of the British army lay at Flushing from Whitestone to Jamaica;" and upon Flushing Heights there stood one of the tar-barrel beacons that reached from New York to Norwich Hill, near Oyster Bay. The British officers used to kill time by playing at Fives against the blank wall of the Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding over to Hempstead Plains to the fox-hunts—where the Meadowbrook Hunt Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, according to the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about a course of nine holes. That was probably the nearest approach to the great game at that time in America, and it may have been played on the site of the present Flushing Golf Club.

These same soldiers also amused themselves in less innocent ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in and about this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live stock indoors over night, to keep it from being made into meals by the British. That may account for the habit of the family occupying the Duryea place referred to; they keep their cow in a room at one end of the house. At any rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to see sights of that sort.

Those are a few of the historic country places that have come to town. There is a surprisingly large number of them, and even when they are not adopted and tableted by the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R. or S. A. R., they are at least known to local fame, and are pointed out and made much of.

But the many abandoned country houses which are not especially historic or significant—except to certain old persons to whom they once meant home—goodly old places, no longer even near the country, but caught by the tide well within the city, that is the kind to be sorry for. Nobody pays much attention to them. A forlorn For Sale sign hangs out in front, weather-beaten and discouraged. The tall Colonial columns still try to stand up straight and to appear unconscious of the faded paint and broken windows, hoping that no one notices the tangle of weeds in the old-fashioned garden, where old-fashioned children used to play hide-and-seek among the box-paths, now overgrown or buried under tin cans.... Across the way, perhaps, there has already squatted an unabashed row of cheap, vulgar houses, impudent, staring little city homes, vividly painted, and all exactly alike, with highly ornamented wooden stoops below and zinc cornices above, like false-hair fronts. They look at times as though they were putting their heads together to gossip and smile about their odd, old neighbor that has such out-of-date fan-lights, that has no electric bell, no folding-beds, and not a bit of zinc cornicing.

Meanwhile the old house turns its gaze the other way, thinking of days gone by, patiently waiting the end—which will come soon enough.