enner, directing himself, not very
unwillingly, to the young girl next him on the other side. Miss Letty
Forrester, the granddaughter of the Reverend Doctor, was city-bred, as
anybody might see, and city-dressed, as any woman would know at sight; a
man might only feel the general effect of clear, well-matched colors, of
harmonious proportions, of the cut which makes everything cling like a
bather's sleeve where a natural outline is to be kept, and ruffle itself
up like the hackle of a pitted fighting-cock where art has a right to
luxuriate in silken exuberance. How this citybred and city-dressed girl
came to be in Rockland Mr. Bernard did not know, but he knew at any rate
that she was his next neighbor and entitled to his courtesies. She was
handsome, too, when he came to look, very handsome when he came to
look again,--endowed with that city beauty which is like the beauty of
wall-fruit, something finer in certain respects than can be reared off
the pavement.

The miserable routinists who keep repeating invidiously Cowper's

"God made the country and man made the town,"

as if the town were a place to kill out the race in, do not know what
they are talking about. Where could they raise such Saint-Michael pears,
such Saint-Germains, such Brown-Beurres, as we had until within a few
years growing within the walls of our old city-gardens? Is the dark
and damp cavern where a ragged beggar hides himself better than a
town-mansion which fronts the sunshine and backs on its own cool shadow,
with gas and water and all appliances to suit all needs? God made the
cavern and man made the house! What then?

There is no doubt that the pavement keeps a deal of mischief from coming
up out of the earth, and, with a dash off of it in summer, just to cool
the soles of the feet when it gets too hot, is the best place for many
constitutions, as some few practical people have already discovered. And
just so these beauties that grow and ripen against the city-walls, these
young fellows with cheeks like peaches and young girls with cheeks like
nectarines, show that the most perfect forms of artificial life can do
as much for the human product as garden-culture for strawberries and
blackberries.

If Mr. Bernard had philosophized or prosed in this way, with so pretty,
nay, so lovely a neighbor as Miss Letty Forrester waiting for him to
speak to her, he would have to be dropped from this narrative as a
person unworthy of his good-fortune