Palmy

From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand, Where Afric’s sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand; From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver Their land from error’s chain.

Elliston was, in his day, the Napoleon of Drury Lane; but, like the conqueror at Austerlitz, he suffered his declensions, and the Surrey became to him a Saint Helena. However, once an eagle always an eagle; and Robert William was no less aquiline in the day of adversity than in his palmy time of patent prosperity.

“It must have been just like the palmy days of the British Drama.”

So, all things being equal, from the beginning of my stay with Travis, I was in as palmy and benign a state as I could remember in many years.

Not many people would argue with his opening insight—that in 1939 people attending the World's Fair gobbled up the optimistic view of the future offered in Flushing Meadows, while people now, in much palmier times than in the late Depression, with World War II looming, are generally pessimistic.