Children who always live with grass and flowers at their feet, and a clear sky overhead, can have no real idea of the charm that
country sights and sounds have for those whose home is in a busy, manufacturing town—a town, in fact, as I lived in when I was a boy, which is more than twenty years ago. My father was a doctor, and we lived in a comfortable house. I was born and raised there; and, ever since I could remember, the last sound that soothed my ears at night and the first to which I awoke in the morning, was the eternal rumbling and rattling of the carts and carriages as they passed over the rough stones. I never noticed if I heard them in the daytime, but at night my chief amusement, as I lay in bed, was to guess by the sound of the wheels what sort of vehicle was passing. "That light, sharp rattle is a horse-drawn cab," I thought. "What a noise it makes and gone in a moment! One gentleman inside, I think. There goes a light cart; that's a carriage by the way the horses step." And the cart came so slowly that I was asleep before it had got safely out of hearing. Ours was a very noisy street, but the noise made the night cheerful; and so did the clock tower near my house, which struck every quarter of an hour; and so did the light of the street lamps, which came through the blinds and fell upon my little bed. We had very little light, except street light and daylight; sunshine rarely found its way to us, and, when it did, people were so little used to it that they pulled down the blinds for fear it should hurt the carpets. In the room that my sister Minnie and I shared, we always welcomed the sunshine with blinds rolled up to the very top; and as we had no carpet, no damage was done.
