lways has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her
pockets, has covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for
life with each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and
succulent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael
would not have disdained to spread over the foreground of his
masterpiece. The Professor pretends that he found such a one in
Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble
vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden
as ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing
pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at
their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and puts
everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way about
everything.--I hold any man cheap,--he said,--of whom nothing stronger
can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.----How is that,
Professor?--said I;--I should have set you down for one of that
sort.--Sir,--said he,--I am proud to say, that Nature has so far
enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a _duck_ without seeing in
it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the garden of the
Luxembourg. And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes devoutly,
like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.

I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature through
all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap up a
million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth which was
green once. The trees look down from the hill-sides and ask each
other, as they stand on tiptoe,--"What are these people about?" And
the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper back,--"We will go
and see." So the small herbs pack themselves up in the least possible
bundles, and wait until the wind steals to them at night and
whispers,--"Come with me." Then they go softly with it into the great
city,--one to a cleft in the pavement, one to a spout on the roof, one
to a seam in the marbles over a rich gentleman's bones, and one to the
grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried,--and there
they grow, looking down on the generations of men from mouldy roofs,
looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, looking out
through iron cemetery-railings. Listen to them, when there is only a
light breath stirring, and you will hear them saying to each
other,--"Wait awhile!" The words run along the telegrap