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 buttercups 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....

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