They want to boost Brooklyn and
boom it and push it and make it the most important borough in Greater
New York, and develop its harbour facilities, and establish a great
university, and double the assessed value of real estate within five
years. Such people are in Brooklyn, but not of it.
And that is why Brooklyn has so strong a hold on me. I like it because
it has so many wonderful, valuable, common things in it. In Brooklyn
there are people, churches, baby-carriages, bay-windows, butchers' boys
carrying baskets and whistling, policemen who misdirect strangers,
vacant lots where boys play baseball, small tradesmen, overhead
trolleys, quiet streets tucked away between parallel lines of clanging
elevated railway, an Institute of Arts, and old gentlemen who write
letters to the newspapers. I like Brooklyn because it hasn't the highest
anything, or the biggest anything, or the richest anything in the
world.
XIV
PALLADINO OUTDONE
Harding spent one long winter night in reading the report of a select
committee of the Society for Psychical Recreation which placed on record
no less than half a dozen absolutely authenticated cases of material
objects being moved through space by some mysterious agency other than
physical.
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