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Updated: June 5, 2025
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 the summer the atmosphere was close and foul with the various odours which came from the back-yards of the adjoining buildings, and in the winter it was dark and damp and gloomy, a culture-ground for bacteria and microbes.
In a moment you are above thickly-thronged streets, and the houses on either side, looking down into the black throats of smoky chimneys; into the garret lairs of poverty, sickness, and sin; down lower upon squads of children trying to play in back-yards eight feet square. It is all wrong, except in the single quality of speed.
Yudino settlement consisted of six little low-pitched huts, the walls of which had already begun to warp out of the perpendicular, though they had certainly not been long built; the back-yards of some of the huts were not even fenced in with a hedge.
I was bound to write something about them and so on; making the most commonplace remarks look brilliant, from the ease and liveliness with which they were spoken, and the tact with which they were made pleasant to the listener: while I wondered at myself, for enjoying from her lips the flippant, sparkling tattle, which had hitherto made young women to me objects of unspeakable dread, to be escaped by crossing the street, hiding behind doors, and rushing blindly into back-yards and coal-holes.
The "cleaning-up" movement, with a public house-cleaning day twice a year when all refuse is carted away, and streets, alleys and back-yards cleaned, had its origin in this way. The care and beautifying of cemeteries is another branch of the work.
The god of hammocks is unfailingly kind, just, and generous to those who have found pancakes wanting and have discovered by inspiration, or what-not, that truffles do not grow in back-yards to be served at early breakfast by the maid-of-all-work.
Beyond this space stood the big brown hospital on the north; the back-yards of the surgeon's and sutler's quarters on the east; while the hypothenuse of the right-angled triangle thus limited was the unsightly fence that bounded the back-yards of officers' row. Mr. Dick Swiveller's delightful view "of over the way" was a gem of landscape in comparison.
The birds came and set up their chorus in the elms, while winter seemed still a thing of yesterday. Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop, and looked across an intervening space of back-yards and fences to where the tall boughs, fresh in their new verdure, were silhouetted against the pure blue sky.
"Father!" she cried again, and held him in so close a clasp that his face reddened quite as much because she choked him as because his heart was beating high with happiness at sight of her. "Come, come," said he, and led her to a chair by the window which commanded a small vista of back-yards the only glimpse of out-of-doors the tiny tenement apartment offered. "My liebling! My little Anna!
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