Nevertheless, the little, common, prosperous road, has bloomed, you
cannot tell how. It is unexpectedly liberal, fresh, and innocent. The
soft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are, for the moment, genuine.

Another day and all is undone. The Rise is its daily self again--a road
of flowers and foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well-built
street. And if you happen to find the men at work on the
re-transformation, you become aware of the accident that made all this
difference. It lay in the little border of wayside grass which a row of
public servants--men with spades and a cart--are in the act of tidying
up. Their way of tidying it up is to lay its little corpse all along the
suburban roadside, and then to carry it away to some parochial dust-heap.

But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would reconcile everything. When
the first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered all
the colour of the world. It had been the brown and russet of
drought--very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became a
translucent, profound, and eager green. The citizen does not spend
attention on it.

Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; in
perception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, so
punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the
grass. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow
and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade.
(To call that spade a spade hardly seems enough.)

For the gracious grass of the summer has not been content within
enclosures. It has--or would have--cheered up and sweetened everything.
Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded to