street upon which a flight of French-roof houses suddenly settled a year
or two since, with families in them, and many outward signs of permanence,
though their precipitate arrival might cast some doubt upon this. I have
to admire their uniform neatness and prettiness, and I look at their
dormer-windows with the envy of one to whose weak sentimentality dormer-
windows long appeared the supreme architectural happiness. But, for all my
admiration of the houses, I find a variety that is pleasanter in the
landscape, when I reach, beyond them, a little bridge which appears to
span a small stream. It unites banks lined with a growth of trees and
briers nodding their heads above the neighboring levels, and suggesting a
quiet water-course, though in fact it is the Fitchburg Railroad that purls
between them, with rippling freight and passenger trains and ever-gurgling
locomotives. The banks take the earliest green of spring upon their
southward slope, and on a Sunday morning of May, when the bells are
lamenting the Sabbaths of the past, I find their sunny tranquillity
sufficient to give me a slight heart-ache for I know not what. If I
descend them and follow the railroad westward half a mile, I come to vast
brick-yards, which are not in themselves exciting to the imagination, and
which yet, from an irresistible association of ideas, remind me of Egypt,
and are forever newly forsaken of those who made bricks without straw; so
that I have no trouble in erecting temples and dynastic tombs out of the
kilns; while the mills for grinding the clay serve me very well for those
sad-voiced _sakias_ or wheel-pumps which the Howadji Curtis heard
wailing at their work of drawing water from the Nile. A little farther on
I come to the boarding-house built at the railroad side for the French
Canadians who have by this time succeeded the Hebrews in the toil of the
brick-yards, and who, as they loiter in windy-voiced, good-humored groups
about the doors of their lodgings, insist upon bringing before me the town
of St. Michel at the mouth of the great Mont Cenis tunnel, where so many
peasant folk like them are always amiably quarreling before the