A trim hedge of
arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board
fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted)
with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which
I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us
were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses;
across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never
could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were
really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of
ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we
calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we
called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We
even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so
lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty
we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,
though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets
of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and
with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were
infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.
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