spring or the autumn, the Avenue is exceptionally enlivened by the
progress of a brace or so of students who, in training for one of the
University Courses of base-ball or boating, trot slowly and earnestly
along the sidewalk, fists up, elbows down, mouths shut, and a sense of
immense responsibility visible in their faces.

The summer is waning with the day as I turn from the Avenue into Benicia
Street. This is the hour when the fly cedes to the mosquito, as the Tuscan
poet says, and, as one may add, the frying grasshopper yields to the
shrilly cricket in noisiness. The embrowning air rings with the sad music
made by these innumerable little violinists, hid in all the gardens round,
and the pedestrian feels a sinking of the spirits not to be accounted for
upon the theory that the street is duller than the Avenue, for it really
is not so.

Quick now, the cheerful lamps of kerosene!--without their light, the cry
of those crickets, dominated for an instant, but not stilled, by the
bellowing of a near-passing locomotive, and the baying of a distant dog,
were too much. If it were the last autumn that ever was to be, it could
not be heralded with notes of dismaller effect. This is in fact the hour
of supreme trial everywhere, and doubtless no one but a newly-accepted
lover can be happy at twilight. In the city, even, it is oppressive; in
the country it is desolate; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it is ever
lived through. The night-winds have not risen yet to stir the languid
foliage of the sidewalk maples; the lamps are not yet lighted, to take
away the gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses near; it is
too late for letters, too early for a book. In town your fancy would turn
to the theatres; in the country you would occupy yourself with cares of
poultry or of stock: in the suburbs you can but sit upon your threshold,
and fight the predatory mosquito.