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Long before we reached the country these lovely apparitions abounded in the back-yards of the little city and suburban dwellings which we ran between, and the bits of gardens were full of homely flowers; when we got to open expanses where nature could find room to spread in lawns that green English turf of hers, the grass was starry with daisies and sunny with dandelions.
Boom, boom, boom!... floated through the air, and this repeated, persistent sound sent a pang to the heart and turned one cold. The old women stood with the holy ikons. Sheep, calves, cows were driven out of the back-yards into the street; boxes, sheepskins, tubs were carried out.
I've seen a great deal of the world, not only in people's kitchens and back-yards but at the street-corners, and on the wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and I'm free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her work so much like one of God's angels as this child Phoebe does!"
It's too new to have any character as yet. There are the rows of red houses and the rows of white houses and the bright green venetians, and the blistering doorways, and the little back-yards they call gardens, and a few feeble shops, and then, just as you think you're going to grasp the physiognomy of the settlement it all melts away." "How the dickens is that?
Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night? how the man wandered from one to another of his old haunts, with a half-consciousness of bidding them farewell, lanes and alleys and back-yards where the mill-hands lodged, noting, with a new eagerness, the filth and drunkenness, the pig-pens, the ash-heaps covered with potato-skins, the bloated, pimpled women at the doors, with a new disgust, a new sense of sudden triumph, and, under all, a new, vague dread, unknown before, smothered down, kept under, but still there?
But, unlike the noble bird from whom he has derived his name, he does not swoop down openly and boldly upon it; quite the contrary; the 'eagle' has recourse to deceit and cunning. He leaves his cart somewhere in a thicket near the village, and goes himself to the back-yards and back- doors, like someone casually passing, or simply a tramp.
Neither do they grow in modest back-yards to be picked of mornings by the maid-of-all-work. A mere bed, notwithstanding its magic camouflage of coverings, of canopy, of disguised pillows, of shining brass or fluted carven posts, is, pancake like, never surrounded by this aura of romance. No, it is hammock sleep which is the sweetest of all slumber.
I cheerfully assented, and we took the cars in Boston, at the Worcester Depot, and after passing a range of unsavory back-yards and ill-favored houses, and winding beneath streets and by the side of kennels, we emerged upon the broad meadows and marshes from which rise in the distance the Roxbury and Brookline hills. The whole region is covered with bright, wooden houses.
At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his followers the meaning of the things he did.
"I'll tell you what he be. He's that here government chap as the Doctor said he'd bring down to set our drains right." "If he goes meddling with our drains, and knocking of our back-yards about, he'll find himself over quay before he's done." "Steady! Steady. He come with my loord, mind." "He might a' taken in his loordship, and be a Roossian spy to the bottom of him after all.
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