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Unluckily there still prevails a very old-fashioned tendency to treat the front fence as in itself ornamental and to forget two things: First, that its nakedness is no part of its ornamental value; that it would be much handsomer lightly clothed underclothed like, probably, its very next neighbor; clothed with a hedge, either close or loose, and generously kept below the passer's line of sight.
He sat facing the road, with a boot on his knees and the awl in his hand, only looking up for a moment as he stretched out his arms and bent forward at the pull, when his spectacles flashed in the passer's face with a shine of flat whiteness, and then returned again to the boot as usual. He smiled at remarks that floated in from without, but was never known to answer them in Mr. Penny's presence.
It lay broadside to the street, two-thirds across a lot of forty feet width, in the good old Creole fashion, its front garden twelve feet deep, and its street fence, of white palings, higher than the passer's head. The parlor and dining-room were on the left, and the two main bedrooms on the right, next the garden; Mrs.
"Oh, come off!" said Becky. "It has cost me many pangs to bring these jewels here " "And you're going to sell them at so much the pang, I s'pose." "For hours together have I walked up and down the Bowery, trying to rouse my feeble courage. But when I would stop under the three golden balls, I seemed to see a sneer on every passer's lips.
But the game usually languished for the aforesaid reason the dismal privacy which the earthen circle enforced, shutting out every appreciative passer's vision, every commendatory remark from outsiders everything, except the sky; and to play at games in such circumstances was like acting to an empty house.
In compensation there was, toward the city, near the ship-yards where the great Italian battle-ships are built, the statue of their builder a man who looked it standing at large ease, with one hand in his pantaloons pocket, and not apparently conscious of the passer's gaze.
Whenever any one's cow was found astray beyond the limits, or any one's bark gutter laid askew so that the roof-water dripped on the passer's head, or whenever the dominie's dog ran howling down the Heeren Graaft with a battered pypken cover tied to his suffering tail, the goode vrouws in the neighbourhood did not stop to wonder who could have done it; they simply raised both hands in a sort of injured resignation and exclaimed: "Ach so; what's gone of Patem's Elishamet's Patem?"
The opera-house dissolved into mist, and Eden was in a carriage, eying through the open window the cut of a passer's gown. In her lap were some flowers; she raised them to her face, and as she put them down again, a cab drove past, bearing her husband and the woman who was considered fly. And this was the woman he wished her to receive! She caught and pinioned her forehead in her hands.
It has the magic to transmute you to this substance yourself, so that while you dawdle afoot, or whisk by in your hansom, or rumble earthquakingly aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of being a part, very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful consciousness.
It may have been only the nearness of the songster that attracted the passer's attention, but he paused and looked up. And then he remarked something more, that the air where he had stopped was filled with the overpowering sweetness of the night-jasmine. He looked around; it could only be inside the fence. There was a gate just there. Would he push it, as his wont was?
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