In fact, there was much that was extremely pleasant about the little
place when the warm weather came, and it was not wonderful to us that
Jenny was willing to remain. It was very quiet; we called one another
to the window if a large dog went by our door; and whole days passed
without the movement of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street,
which flourished in ragweed and buttercups and daisies, and in the
autumn burned, like the borders of nearly all the streets in
Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of the succory. The
neighborhood was in all things a frontier between city and country.
The horse-cars, the type of such civilization--full of imposture,
discomfort, and sublime possibility--as we yet possess, went by the
head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to one skilled
in calculating the movements of comets; while two minutes' walk would
take us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible
through the trees. We learned, like innocent pastoral people of the
golden age, to know the several voices of the cows pastured in the
vacant lot, and, like engine-drivers of the iron-age, to distinguish
the different whistles of the locomotives passing on the neighboring
railroad. . . .
We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes,
which the chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as
they ripened; and we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton
blackberries, which, after attaining the most stalwart proportions,
were still as bitter as the scrubbiest of their savage brethren, and
which, when by advice left on the vines for a week after they turned
black, were silently gorged by secret and gluttonous flocks of robins
and orioles. As for our grapes, the frost cut them off in the hour of
their triumph.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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