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Updated: June 5, 2025
It was a dusky back room, plastered and painted yellow; its one window looking into the very narrowest of back-yards or courts, and out on a confused multitude of back buildings, appertaining to other houses, most of them old, with rude chimneys of wash-rooms and kitchens, the bricks of which seemed half loose.
This led them first past the "back-yards" of Stratford, then over a stile and through the green meadows, where daisies and cowslips abound. As they went along, Mrs. Pitt repeated to them the following little verse from Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale": "Jog on, jog on, the footpath way, And merrily hent the stile-a; A merry heart goes all the way, Your sad tires in a mile-a."
There cannot be another town in the world that has no shabby exteriors; no rickety gates and fences, no neglected houses crumbling to ruin, no crazy and unsightly sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no back-yards littered with tin cans and old boots and empty bottles, no rubbish in the gutters, no clutter on the sidewalks, no outer-borders fraying out into dirty lanes and tin-patched huts.
Thus the laws of health are disregarded; and when fever comes, it finds a wide field to work upon: in undrained and filthy streets and back-yards, noisome, pestilential districts, foul, uncleansed dwellings, large populations ill-supplied with clean water and with pure air.
Their garden-plots were set on end; they must needs adapt themselves to the angle of demarkation; they loomed above their front-yards while their back-yards lorded it over their roofs.
The soil is not wholly clay, but partly sand and gravel; the village itself, however, stands chiefly on clay, and the streets therefore after heavy rains, become filled with muddy puddles. On damp nights the chorus of frogs and toads which swarm in weedy back-yards creates such a bewildering uproar that it is impossible to carry on a conversation indoors except by shouting.
And Wooden-leg Larsen, who in winter is quite the well-to-do pensioner, in blue pilot-coat and fur cap, leaves his pretty, solidly-built cottage when the Spring comes, and sallies forth into the world as a poor organ-grinder he tells them of the Zoological Gardens on the hill, and the adventurous Holm-Street, and of extraordinary beings who live upon the dustbins in the back-yards of the capital.
In their active sports, in small thefts, raids into back-yards, window-breaking, and other minor juvenile recreations, he is a full participant. In this way he is the reflection of the wickedness of many masters, without possessing the virtues or peculiarities of any particular one.
Drew with him, pleading with people to no purpose; now and then he would break out with curses against war-makers, and especially those who made explosives and transported them in freight-trains through other men's back-yards. For once people heard him without threats of lynching. So on through this night of anguish.
One day he sauntered, riding on Malek-Adel, about the back-yards of the priest's quarters round about the church of the parish in which is Bezsonovo. Huddled up, with his Cossack fur cap pulled down over his eyes, and his hands hanging loose on the saddle-bow, he jogged slowly on, a vague discontent in his heart. Suddenly someone called him.
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