The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff Page A

Chester-the-Sheep-Dog. Nikki came up from her office and met us there. You have to be crazy to picnic on Dog Hill, but Dick and I thought we’d try it. We didn’t get there till six-thirty, most of the dogs had gone home.
    Dog Hill is a broad, sloping hill in Central Park, and the largest canine Social Hall in the world. On a weekend afternoon you’ll see forty or fifty dogs up there, charging around off leash meeting friends. (You don’t take a dog toDog Hill unless he’s a friend to the world but I never met a New York dog who wasn’t.) On a good day you’ll see everything from Afghans and Norwegian elkhounds to Shih-tzus and Lhasa Apsos, not to mention all the standard brands. The dog owners sit on the grass or stand around like parents at a children’s party, keeping an eye out for sudden spats over whose stick it is or whose ball it is.
    â€œGeorge, if you can’t play nicely we’re going home!”
    â€œMabel, get off him! I don’t wanna hear about it, just get off him!”
    You do not stretch out on the grass to sunbathe because if a couple of great Danes and a collie are having a race and you’re lying in their path they’re not going to detour for you.
    Dick and Nikki and I settled at the top of the hill and Dick poured out the bloody marys in paper cups. A few dogs were playing halfway down the hill, and normally Chester-the-Sheep-Dog would have joined them. But he’d smelled the picnic basket all the way to the park so he just loped down the hill and sniffed everybody and then came back up, figuring he’d hang around us till dinner time.
    I understood this, so when I got out the sandwiches I gave Chester a sliver of turkey out of mine. That was all it took. In five seconds, there was a semicircle of dogs in front of me: every dog left on the hill had come to the picnic.
    There were two basset-hound brothers named Sam and Sid, Romulus, who is a great Dane, a beagle I didn’t know and a very timid German shepherd pup named Helga—all standing stock still, eyes glued to me and my turkey sandwich. The beagle was drooling.
    I had an extra sandwich in reserve so I sacrificed theone I’d started on and gave each dog in turn a sliver of turkey. (Helga was very nervous, she was anxious to step up for her piece of turkey but how did she know I wouldn’t bite her?)
    Chester-the-Sheep-Dog figured there was too much competition, so he left and trotted back to visit Nikki’s sandwich. And just as I was feeding the rest of the dogs the last of the turkey, Nikki set up a great to-do because Chester had taken a sip of her bloody mary. Dick called, “Chester! Sit!” And Chester, wanting to show how well-trained he was, sat on Nikki’s deviled egg. Whereupon Nikki took a fit. (She’s young and pretty and she went to the London School of Economics for a year, but she’s a cat lover.) I turned and called Chester, hoping to lure him away from her—and the instant my back was turned, the beagle (Morton, I think his name was) seized the untouched reserve sandwich and made off down the hill with it.
    His mother came up to apologize and thank me; she said he only eats chicken and now she wouldn’t have to cook for him when they got home.
    We walked back down through the park to the Seventy-second Street entrance, past a baseball game and an impromptu marimba band fighting a rock concert that penetrated clear up from Fifty-ninth street.
    Lying in peaceful St. James’s, I realize how much a city’s parks reflect the character of its people. The parks here are tranquil, quiet, a bit reserved, and I love them. But on a long-term basis, I would sorely miss the noisy exuberance of Central Park.

9 p.m.
    The Colonel phoned up, he’s back. He said, What part of our glorious countryside did I want to see most? I told him I was going to Oxford next Friday and I’d be very grateful if he wanted to drive me