Suburban Sketches | Page 2

with the conveniences and luxuries of the
city about us. The house was almost new and in perfect repair; and,
better than all, the kitchen had as yet given no signs of unrest in those
volcanic agencies which are constantly at work there, and which, with
sudden explosion, make Herculaneums and Pompeiis of so many
smiling households. Breakfast, dinner, and tea came up with illusive
regularity, and were all the most perfect of their kind; and we laughed
and feasted in our vain security. We had out from the city to banquet
with us the friends we loved, and we were inexpressibly proud before
them of the Help, who first wrought miracles of cookery in our honor,
and then appeared in a clean white apron, and the glossiest black hair,
to wait upon the table. She was young, and certainly very pretty; she
was as gay as a lark, and was courted by a young man whose clothes
would have been a credit, if they had not been a reproach, to our lowly
basement. She joyfully assented to the idea of staying with us till she
married.
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 butter-cups 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 lots, and, like
engine-drivers of the iron age, to distinguish the different whistles of
the locomotives passing on the neighboring railroad. The trains shook
the house as they thundered along, and at night were a kind of company,
while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds. Now and
then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows--which, tied by
long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against the
trunks, and had to be unwound with great ado of hooting and
hammering-- came and peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening
pears. All round us carpenters were at work building new houses; but
so far from troubling us, the strokes of their hammers fell softly upon
the sense, like one's heart-beats upon one's own consciousness in the
lapse from all fear of pain under the blessed charm of an anaesthetic.
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.
So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that Jenny should be willing
to remain with us, and were as little prepared for her desertion as for
any other change of our moral state. But one day in September she
came to her nominal mistress with tears in her beautiful eyes and
protestations of unexampled devotion upon her tongue, and said that
she was afraid she must leave us. She liked the place, and she never had
worked for any one that was more of a lady, but she had made up her
mind to go into the city. All this, so far, was quite in the manner of
domestics who, in ghost stories, give warning to the occupants of
haunted houses; and Jenny's mistress listened in suspense for the
motive of her desertion, expecting to hear no less than that it was
something which walked up and down the stairs and dragged iron links
after it, or something that came and groaned at the front door, like

populace dissatisfied with a political candidate. But it was