as he duteously interprets the old, primeval language of the leaves; as
he listens to the death-doomed trees, still whispering mournfully
around him the last notes of their ancient even-song!

But what avails the voice of lamentation? What new neighborhood ever
stopped on its way into the country, to hearken to the passive
remonstrance of the fields, or to bow to the indignation of outraged
admirers of the picturesque? Never was suburb more impervious to any
faint influences of this sort, than that especial suburb which grew up
between Baregrove Square and the country; removing a walk among the
hedge-rows a mile off from the resident families, with a ruthless
rapidity at which sufferers on all sides stared aghast. First stories
were built, and mortgaged by the enterprising proprietors to get money
enough to go on with the second; old speculators failed and were
succeeded by new; foundations sank from bad digging; walls were blown
down in high winds from hasty building; bricks were called for in such
quantities, and seized on in such haste, half-baked from the kilns,
that they set the carts on fire, and had to be cooled in pails of water
before they could be erected into walls--and still the new suburb
defied all accidents, and grew irrepressibly into a little town of
houses, ready to be let and lived in, from the one end to the other.

The new neighborhood offered house-accommodation--accepted at the
higher prices as yet only to a small extent--to three distinct
subdivisions of the great middle class of our British population. Rents
and premises were adapted, in a steeply descending scale, to the means
of the middle classes with large incomes, of the middle classes with
moderate incomes, and of the middle classes with small incomes. The
abodes for the large incomes were called "mansions," and were fortified
strongly against the rest of the suburb by being all built in one wide