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 butter-cups 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. The
trains shook the house as they thundered along, and at night were a kind
of company, while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds. Now
and then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows--which, tied
by long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against the
trunks, and had to be unwound with great ado of hooting and hammering--
came and peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening pears. All
round us carpenters were at work building new houses; but so far from
troubling us, the strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense,
like one's heart-beats upon one's own consciousness in the lapse from all
fear of pain under the blessed charm of an anaesthetic.

We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes, which