VIII.

EAVESDROPPING IN ASPEN STREET.


Some of the old builders,--not the _very_ old ones, for they built
nothing but rope-walks down behind the hill,--but some of those who
began to go northwest from the State House to live, made a pleasant
group of streets down there on the level stretching away to the
river, and called them by fresh, fragrant, country-suggesting
names. Names of trees and fields and gardens, fruits and blossoms;
and they built houses with gardens around them. In between the
blocks were deep, shady places; and the smell of flowers was tossed
back and forth by summer winds between the walls. Some nice old
people stayed on there, and a few of their descendants stay on there
still, though they are built in closely now, for the most part, and
coarse, common things have much intruded, and Summit Street
overshadows them with its palaces.

Here and there a wooden house, set back a little, like this of the
Ripwinkleys in Aspen Street, gives you a feeling of Boston in the
far back times, as you go by; and here and there, if you could get
into the life of the neighborhood, you might perhaps find a
household keeping itself almost untouched with change, though there
has been such a rush and surge for years up and over into the newer
and prouder places.

At any rate, Titus Oldways lived here in Greenley Street; and he