One very striking difference between Coney Island and the French fair is
the absence of children from New York's "safety-valve," as some one
described it to me. I saw hardly any. It is as though once again the
child's birthday gifts had been appropriated by its elders; but as a
matter of fact the Parks of Steeplechase and Luna were, I imagine,
designed deliberately for adults. Judging by the popularity of the
chutes and the whips, the switchbacks and the witching waves, eccentric
movement has a peculiar attraction for the American holiday-maker. As
some one put it, there is no better way, or at any rate no more thorough
way, of throwing young people together. Middle-aged people, too. But the
observer receives no impression of moral disorder. High spirits are the
rule, and impropriety is the exception. Even in the auditorium at
Steeplechase Park, where the _cognoscenti_ assemble to witness the
discomfiture of the uninitiated, there is nothing but harmless laughter
as the skirts fly up before the unsuspected blast. Such a performance in
England, were it permitted, would degenerate into ugliness; in France,
too, it would make the alien spectator uncomfortable. But the essential
public chastity of the Americans--I am not sure that I ought not here to
write civilisation of the Americans--emerges triumphant.
It was at Coney Island that I came suddenly upon the Pig Slide and had a
new conception of what quadrupeds can do for man.
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