Ann Arbor (Mich.) -- Fiction; Short stories, American
There is a pale moon, consequently the electric street-lamps are
unlighted. The setting is nowise picturesque. The street is narrow,
unpaved, and fringed on either side with maples in leaf. It is late
June. To right and left, are to be discerned behind the trees rows of
characterless frame houses, that, for the greater part, are set well
back in yards, where, here and there, are lilac bushes, rose trees,
smoke trees, and silver birches, ghostly in the thin light. The moon's
rays, glimmering upon the latched green blinds of the lower
stories--which seem black--streak them with white.
At the end of the block, on the east side of the street, stands a house
markedly different from the others. It is three stories in height,
whilst they are two; the lawn, cut by a gravel path, slopes gently to
the walk, and is close cropped; across the front of the house and
continuing unbroken along either side to the back is a broad, covered
porch with a spindled rail at its edge like a little fence. The only
door is at the top of the path, in front. In a window directly above
the door is a card the legend on which the moon makes clear--"Rooms to
Rent." There is no fence about the place. On the south side another
gravel path, narrower than the one in front and bordered with box, links
the sidewalk to the porch. The main path prongs to still another set of
steps on the north side. The house is white and looms big in the
paleness. In a pear-tree near the south porch-steps a katydid scrapes
her dreary tune; whilst, on the north steps, a vagrant cat sits in
silent adoration of the night, contemplating, presumably, the joys
thereof. A stillness made the more tangible by the katydid's song
pervades the scene.
The deep throated bells in the library tower on the campus ring out six
times--ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong. Accurately it lacks but fifteen
minutes of being midnight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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