Opposite my study windows is an empty lot. It is of generous size; six residences facing another street, with high board fences, stretch across the back; a large apartment-house towers above it on the right, and a tight fence defines it on the left. The front is open to the street, but the whole is so given up to weeds, such a tangle of rank vegetation, that few people penetrate it, and it is the great out-of-doors for the animal life of the neighborhood. Looking down upon it as I do, constantly spread out under my windows, I cannot choose but see everything that goes on. Last summer was the blossoming-time of the empty lot. It had but one summer of romance--just one--between the building of the brick row behind it and the beginning of the new row which shall hide it from the sun for ages, perhaps. [Sidenote: _A RELAPSE INTO BARBARISM._] It was not attractive in the spring, for man had done what he could to deface it. Here is a curious fact: the human being is capable of a certain amount of civilization under the pressure of the necessities of city life. He--or she--will learn to dispose inoffensively of the waste and rubbish that drag after him like a trail wherever he goes. He--and always likewise she--can be taught to burn his waste paper, to bag his rags, to barrel his ashes, to burn the refuse from his table, to hide the relics of china and glass. In fact, he _can_ live in a modern house with no back yard, no "glory-hole" whatever. Yet if one would see how superficial his culture, how easy his relapse into barbarism, he need only open his windows upon an empty lot. This tempting space, this unguarded bit of the universe, brings out all the savage within him. Ashes and old boots, broken glass, worn-out tin pans, and newspapers whose moment is over, alike drift naturally into that unfortunate spot. The lot under my window had suffered at the hands of lawless men,--not to say women,--for it offered the eternal oblivion of "over the back fence" to no less than ten kitchens with their presiding genii. Nor was this all. The lot and all the land about it had belonged to an unsettled estate, and for years had been a dumping-ground for carts, long before the surrounding buildings had begun their additions to its stores. But last spring a change came to it. Its nearly fenced condition for the first time allowed Mother Nature a chance, and anxious, like other mothers, to hide the evil deeds of her children, she went busily to work, "With a hand of healing to cover the wounds And strew the artificial mounds And cuttings with underwood and flowers." We may call them weeds, but forever blessed be the hardy, rapid-growing, ever-ready plants we name so scornfully! What else could so quickly answer the mother's purpose? She had not time to evolve a century-plant, or elaborate an oak-tree, before man would be upon it again. She did the best she could, and the result was wonderful.