pon Mush Street? Do you suppose I ever would have bought that house
and lot if I had suspected even for a moment that they were not in
Clarendon Avenue? Mush Street is just horrid--everybody else thinks
so, and I know it! I won't have it Mush Street; it's Clarendon Avenue,
and I 'm going to have Clarendon Avenue engraved on my cards! Reuben,
you must see at once that the lamp-posts are changed."

I confess that so far as I myself am concerned it matters not whether
my abiding place be in Mush Street or in Clarendon Avenue so long as I
am comfortably bedded and fed and my family are well provided for.
Names are, at best, arbitrary things. Moreover, I was well aware (and
you will see for yourself if you consult a map of our city) that that
thoroughfare which has been renamed Clarendon Avenue is actually Mush
Street, or, at any rate, a continuation of Mush Street. However, I had
a regard for that sense of feminine pride which made Alice revolt
against Mush Street. I am aware that the conspicuous characteristics
of Mush Street for many miles are goats and fortune-tellers and coal
yards and rumshops and midwiveries; these glaring features are by no
means such as the elite of our society care to affect. Conceding that
my indifference to these idiosyncrasies should not be suffered to stand
in the way of the natural current of Alice's womanly pride, I promised
to do my best toward effecting what Alice required, and I am now
engaged upon a memorial to the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen praying
that the lamp-posts in Clarendon Avenue be purged of that lettering
which suggests the commonplace antecedents of that thoroughfare.

I find that Alice is not alone in her wretchedness. It appears that
our friends Lawyer Miles and Mr. Redleigh and their families are at
present engaged in the momentous task of getting the name of the street
in which they live changed from Cemetery Avenue to Sportland Place.
And our other friends two blocks west of us are greatly agitated just
now because the name of their aristocratic thoroughfare has, by a whim
of the municipal authorities, been changed from Alexander Avenue to
Osgood Street. I have mentioned these facts to Alice, but no sense of
that sympathy which is said to arise from the companionship of misery
seems to reconcile my dear wife to the plebeian association which the
mere mention of Mush Street suggests.

The Sunday morning after we had actually bought the Schmittheimer place