Round the Block | Page 2

only
view that the reader of this book will get; for it is the author's intention
profoundly to respect the select seclusion of the occupants.
Now, the west side of the block was in all respects, exactly opposite to
the east side. The houses were built of bricks, dingy with the whirling
dust of twenty years. Two of the three stories swarmed with women
and children, always visible at all seasons; and the lower story was
devoted to some kind of cheap trade. Wholesale business is gregarious
in its ways; but it is the habit of retail business to scatter, so as to
present, in the same neighborhood, no two people in exactly the same
line. Thus it happened that, on the west side of the block, there was
only one drygoods dealer, whose shop front and awning posts were
festooned with calicoes and other fabrics, ticketed with ingeniously
deformed figures, and bearing some attractive adjective, expressing the
owners private and conscientious opinion of their excellence. There
was one boot-maker, who strung up his products in long branches, like
onions; and, although his business was not at all flourishing, solaced
himself with the reflection that he had a monopoly of it on the block.
There was one apothecary, between whose flashing red and yellow
lights and those of his nearest rival there was a desirable distance. A
solitary coffinmaker, a butcher, a baker, a newspaper vender, a barber,
a confectioner, a hardware merchant, a hatter, and a tailor, each
encroaching rather extensively on the sidewalk with the emblems of his
trade, rejoiced in their exemption from a ruinous competition. The only
people on the block whose interests appeared to clash, were the grocers,
who flanked either corner, and made a large and delusive show of
boxes, barrels, and tea chests; and it was strongly suspected that they
were identical in interests, under different names, and maintained a

secret league to catch all the custom of the vicinity.
The south side was a gradation of buildings, from the two-story brick
grocery on the west corner to the grandest of the stone mansions on the
east. With the exception of two or three houses built in the early history
of the block, and occupied by obstinate old proprietors, it presented
such a regularly ascending line of roofs, that a giant could have walked
up stairs from one end to the other. Although each house was built
upon a plan peculiar to itself, and supposed to reflect the
long-cherished views of the original owner, there were certain
resemblances among them. This was sometimes the effect of a jealous
rivalry; sometimes of imitation. In one dozen houses there was a costly
struggle for supremacy in window curtains. In another dozen, the
harmless contest pertained to Grecian urns crowned with flowers, or
dry dolphins, tritons, or naiads, rising from the bosoms of little gravel
beds in miniature front yards. In a third dozen, there was a perspective
of broad iron balconies elegantly constructed for show, and sometimes
put to hazardous use, on warm summer nights, by venturesome
gentlemen with cigars, or ladies with fans.
About the middle of the block was a colony of doctors, who had
increased, in five years, from two to ten. Their march was eastward,
and it could be calculated to a nicety how long it would be before the
small black, gilt-lettered signs of their profession would press hard
upon the great house at the corner. Why they thus congregated together,
unless with the friendly purpose of relieving each other's patients in
each other's absence, and so saving humanity from sudden suffering
and death, was a mystery to everybody but themselves.
The north side lacked variety. One part of it, comprising twenty lots,
had been built up on speculation by an enterprising landowner. The
houses were precisely alike, from coal cellar to chimney top, with front
railings of exactly the same pattern, crowned with iron pineapples from
the same mould, encompassing little plots of ground laid out in walks
similar to the fraction of a hair; the sole ornaments of which were four
little spruce trees, planted at equal distances apart.
This row of houses was very distracting even to the occupants, with

whom it was a feat of arithmetic to identify their homes in the daytime,
and much more so at night, when the landmarks were shadowy and
indistinguishable. Occasionally, well-meaning tenants found
themselves pulling at wrong doorbells; and there was one man who got
tipsy every Saturday night, and rang himself quite through the row
before he tumbled in on his own hall carpet. It was in counting the
spruce trees, he said, which had a perplexing way of doubling, that he
invariably lost the track.
In nearly every house on this block there was a piano. The piano was