Time and Again

It was a big, green-enameled swan's-neck affair, a beautiful sleigh. They were five kids in their late teens and early twenties, and one of the girls, in a red-and-white knitted cap tied under her chin, began singing: Dashing through the snow! In a one-horse open sleigh! O'er the field we go! And then all ten of us, everyone but me knowing all the words, came in on Laughing all the way! To the exact rhythm of our horses' hoofs and the jounce of our bells, we lined it out: Bells on bobtail ring! Making spirits bright! What fun it is to ride and sing — and it was; oh, Lord, it was — a sleighing song tonight! Then we roared it: Jingle bells, jingle bells! Jingle all the way! Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh! For two blocks — people on the walks calling out to us, kids throwing snowballs at us — we sang. Beside me Julia's voice was high, a soprano, very clear, very sweet and lovely, the white mist of her breath punctuating every phrase. Maud was nearly inaudible, Aunt Ada surprisingly youthful and good, Jake a rumbling baritone; and I guess I was a sort of lost-in-the-shuffle tenor. At the corner the kids swung south. Waving and yelling at each other, we headed north toward Central Park, both sleighs continuing to sing as long as each could hear the other.

Felix caught up with us, and in the Park he took the lead, and we all flew along the curving roads with hundreds of other sleighs. Fast as we moved, sleighs raced past us, hoofs drumming, the ru

Half a mile farther on Felix saw another shot he-wanted, and as we waited behind him and I saw what he was taking — the shot below — I agreed; he had a good eye. They didn't notice us; the mother was getting out a handkerchief for the boy on the sleigh; and I heard the child in the carriage call the older woman "Na

While Felix was taking the shot I walked over to their sleigh. When he finished I told him I'd seen an apartment building across the Park at Seventy-second Street that I admired, and asked if he'd take a picture of it for me. "The Dakota," he said. "Sure! Only you take it," and he handed me the camera. I hesitated, but I did want to use it and thanked him, and he showed me how to load in a new dry-plate.

Halfway across the park I asked Jake to stop, and — Felix helping — I took the photo on the opposite page. I like it; it shows how alone the Dakota was. But I didn't allow too well for reflected light from the ice, and, embarrassingly, it's overexposed. There was a man in the middle foreground, for example, wearing a silk topper, and I don't know if you can see him. We moved on, closer to the Dakota, and — it was a simple camera, really, and a good one — I set it on a stone pillar for a time exposure because the light was failing, and I got a beauty: this one. I couldn't do better with a Leica, Graflex, or anything else, in fact.

On through the park then, and out, and far up past it out into actual open countryside — astoundingly, still on Manhattan Island — until finally we stopped at a big wooden i

Inside, every table was occupied, the place jammed, the roar of voices and laughter so loud it was almost impossible to talk. Felix had called to me, and I worked my way over to his group, losing mine. We had sandwiches and hot wine, standing up — there wasn't a table empty — talking a little over the roar, but mostly just gri

It was an extraordinary afternoon and night, worth a news story in the Times next morning, headed "ON THE ROAD" THOUSANDS OF MERRY REVELERS ENJOYING THE SLEIGHING, and it said:

Those persons who owned cutters, ancient sleighs, old piano-box sleds, or any kind of a conveyance on ru

Commissioner of Public Works Hubert O. Thompson, in a delicate cutter, was an object of much interest as he drove in a gentle ma

After dark, when the whole country was white and bright in the moonlight, and the street lamps for miles around seemed like so many lightning-bugs on parade, the fun was at its height, and great sleighs, crowded with laughing and singing young men and women, were rapidly moving in all directions….

We drove home through that night — the others had been waiting for me when we came out of Gabe Case's — and though a wind had come up and it was turning colder, we were snug under our robes, and we sang softly, "The Spanish Cavalier" and, very softly and slowly, "Bring Back My Bo