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Updated: June 2, 2025
"Not to-day," answered Miss Annie, after throwing a despairing glance upon the rolls of calicoes, the coils of clothes-lines, the battered tin boxes of tea and sugar, the dusty and chimneyless kerosene lamps, and the long rows of canned goods with their gaudy labels; and then she departed.
Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining wilderness of rock and fern. Charity could not recall her first sight of the house.
In turn, this pulley set in toll still another bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of gibbet-looking clothes-lines, dangling perpetual specters of flapping union suits in a mid-air flaky with soot.
The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line with their towering stories, implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in continental Europe.
On these days she dreaded to go down the long hail to the kitchen, where the fluttering clothes-lines on fire-escapes at the back of the next apartment house offered the only suggestion of human companionship in the unfriendly wilderness of the city.
The perspective of one of these narrow cracks of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away till they come together in the distance like railway tracks; its clothes-lines crossing over at all altitudes and waving their bannered raggedness over the swarms of people below; and the white-dressed women perched in balcony railings all the way from the pavement up to the heavens a perspective like that is really worth going into Neapolitan details to see.
That's nothing, if it gives us an extra five minutes now, while they hold a council of war. Is that a working flag-staff overhead?" "It used to be." "Then there'll be halliards." "They were as thin as clothes-lines.". "And they're sure to be rotten, and we should be seen cutting them down. No, Bunny, that won't do. Wait a bit. Is there a lightning conductor?" "There was."
The bright scene etched itself in my memory the bare brown slopes with which the pond was bordered, the Irish shanties, the clothes-lines with red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind; Nancy motionless on the bank; the group behind her, silent now, impressed in spite of itself at the sight of our intrepidity.
And the days crept on, each counted and marked off: so many white stripes on the rafters and black stripes on the almanack; they fell away one by one and the Saturday came, the long-expected eve of the great Sunday. Quite early, before sunrise, the linen hung outside, the white smocks and shirts waving, like fluttering pennons, from the clothes-lines in the white orchard.
But the conception of the sun as God's flat-iron, smoothing out and warming the moist earth, as a housewife smooths and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is an astounding illustration of that "familiar grasp of things divine," which obtains in so many of our rustic households.
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