for the gardener to replace it.

"Is it difficult to get up a ladder, Bobby?" ask I, standing still.

"Difficult! Bless your heart, no! Why?"

"One can see nothing here," I answer. "I should like to climb up and sit
on the top of the wall, where one can look about one."

My wish is easy of gratification. Bobby holds the ladder, and I climb
cautiously, rung by rung. Having reached the summit, I sit at ease,
with, my legs loosely dangling. There is no broken glass, there are no
painful bottoms of bottles to disturb my ruminant quiet. The air bites a
little, but I am warmly clad, and young. Bobby sits beside me, whistling
and kicking the bricks with his heels. There is the indistinctness of
fine weather over the chain of low round hills that bound our horizon,
giving them a dignity that, on clearer days, they lack. As I sit, many
small and pleasant noises visit my ears, sometimes distinct, sometimes
mixed together; the brook's noise, as it runs, quick and brown, between
the flat, dry March fields; the gray geese's noise, as they screech all
together from the farm-yard; the church-bells' noise, as they ring out
from the distant town, whose roofs and vanes are shining and glinting in
the morning sun.

"Do you hear the bells?" say I. "Some one has been married this
morning."

"Do not you wish it was you?" asks Bobby, with a brotherly grin.

"I should not mind," reply I, picking out a morsel of mortar with my