Read "Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America" by Richard Harding Davis online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
SHOVED off by itself in a corner of Central Park on the top of a wooded hill, where only the people who live in the high apartment-houses at Eighty-first Street can see it, is an equestrian statue. It is odd, bizarre, and inartistic, and suggests in size and pose that equestrian statue to General Jackson which mounts guard before the White House in Washington. It shows a chocolate-cream soldier mastering with one hand a rearing rocking-horse, and with the other pointing his sword towards an imaginary enemy.
Sometimes a "sparrow" policeman saunters up the hill and looks at the statue with unenlightened eyes, and sometimes a nurse-maid seeks its secluded site, and sits on the pedestal below it while the children of this free republic play unconcernedly in its shadow. On the base of this big statue is carved the name of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela.