Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 1

IT is a common city yard, about eighteen feet by fifty. Part of it has to be given up to clothes and lines on Monday, and during the rest of the week it is a repository for broken toys belonging to Clarence and Harold, the younger members of the family, and an occasional and surreptitious tomato-can, emptied of the material that might make it interesting. The cans we firmly replace in the yards of the neighbors who sent them. It is a yard, too, that is loved by tuneful cats; and even a Newfoundland dog, owned by a carpenter behind us, bounces over the five-foot board fence now and then, alighting with exactitude on a bed of gladiolus, so that the ​flowering of that plant is a surprise, and we lay little wagers as to whether or not there will be a bloom this year.

The zoölogy of the district likewise comprises English sparrows, slimy slugs, and earth-worms. Mosquitos call whenever the wind brings them in from the fens of Long Island and the meadows of New Jersey; and we are liable to have flies. There are beetles, gnats, fire-flies, centipedes, and a rarely visible mouse. In flower time we enjoy the company of bees, both honey and bumble, vagrom wasps, and hornets and moths and butterflies in great numbers,

Then, let’s see: we have a cricket or two, and a periodical delegation of grass-hoppers. We have stocked the place with three toads and a turtle. The ability of these citizens to hide themselves in a space so small is wonderful. As to minor denizens and visitors, their name is legion, and they are a corrupt, unconscionable, pernickety lot. They are the aphides, the common plant-lice that prey by myriads on the poppies and chrysanthemums, the ​wood-lice or sow-bugs, the rose-bugs, the McGonigle boy, the caterpillars that strip the zinnias, the blue beetles on the asters, the mealy bugs that spread over the cacti, the scale that dot the palms, the hard-shelled, many-legged wire-worms that burrow through and kill the roots of bachelor-buttons, and our experimental louseworts, coiling like ammonites when shaken out; and we stir up potato-bugs and seventeen-year locusts when we gather our hay crop with a lawn-mower.

But while the flora and fauna of the region are not exciting or numerous, there are more of both than you would suspect from the local geography. The yard is bounded on the north by the carpenter's yard, with its piles of lumber; on the east by a beard fence and a lilac-bush; on the west by small boys and a gravel dump—on the far side, to be sure, of three other yards; on the south by the two-story and basement brick house where we live.

The house is one of a row that has uniformity without duplication, and is supplied with all modern improvements except com​fort, low rent, protection from the weather, and a few other matters. Every second or third house in this row has what appears from the front to be a small, windowless gable. But it isn’t. It is a flimsy half pyramid of tin and wood, about four feet high; and the rent of a house crowned with this ornament is two dollars a month extra.

Our neighbors are peaceable, orderly people, for the larger part, though one or two of them do play popular marches on the piano with their windows open. But on every block in a city, as in every village in the country (the number of inhabitants in each case averaging the same), there is sure to be a boy who is the scorn, the by-word, and to a certain extent the terror, of the whole community. The boy on our row who contains sin, vicariously, for the rest of us is Reginald McGonigle, the son of a contractor who is fairly well off through his political privileges, and who has moved in among us, to the general uneasiness. He —Michael, not Reginald—sits on his door-step in his shirt sleeves at evening, smoking ​cigars when he has company and a clay pipe when alone. Reginald goes out with a tin pail to a saloon on another street from two to five times daily. Asked by one of us why he did so, he said he was going for yeast; then he thrust out his chin, extruded his lower lip with his tongue, looked intensely cross-eyed, pressed his thumb at the tip of a blunt and dirty nose, and gave a waving motion to his fingers. Reginald is about ten years of age, and wears knickerbockers and a cap; but there is no form of sin known to centenarians with which he is not on terms of contemptuous familiarity.

He has freckles, small, round eyes, sullen brows, two of his upper teeth are always conspicuous, his hair is full of tumult and suggestions, his clothes are expensive but never clean, his voice is loud and harsh, his manner imperative, and he is strong for his age. When interrupted in a burglary or a murder, he looks at the remonstrant with majestic calm, and after hearing him out deigns no reply, but proceeds with his crime. If, however, any one re​proaches him with a horsewhip or a howitzer, he exhibits a pair of brisk legs, and disappears into his own stronghold, from the windows of which he leans directly after, and offers shrill and reprehensible criticisms. It is the joy of his life to injure animals when he cannot injure people; and not a dog or cat in the vicinage but takes to flight when he appears. He has broken more windows and street lamps, trampled more flowers, secreted for his own behoof more of other boys’ marbles, knives, and pennies, blackened more eyes, torn down more fences, appropriated more ash-barrels for bonfires, smeared mud on more little girls’ dresses, frightened more babies, put tar on more door-steps, run off with more bicycles, misdirected more callers and delivery-wagons, and is oftener trespassing on other people's premises, than all of the other children in the street. When his parents are visited by an indignant committee, they ask him if the charges against him are true, and he modestly admits that they are not. So the parents turn the eye of astonishment on the visi​tors, and the incident is closed. The police have been appealed to several times; but Captain Muldoon, of our precinct, is Mrs. McGonigle’s cousin, and, somehow, nothing seems to get itself done. The McGonigle oasis in our otherwise slow neighborhood is a fateful fixity.

Our yard, though partly grown to grass and clothes-lines and footprints, is bordered with beds; and we have a diamond-shaped space near the house for pelargoniums, or “Martha Washington geraniums,” other geraniums, and coleus. You might not believe that we had nearly sixty varieties of plant in bloom there at once in warm weather, and that the orchids hanging on the house wall above the kitchen windows, and in a shady corner, in pots, flourished in spite of the forebodings of florists, and even made bold, some of them, to blossom in a window next winter. People think because some orchids cost a thousand dollars, and perish as soon as you get them home,—true vegetable aristocrats,—that two-dollar orchids must die as promptly and with equal emphasis, especially if ​they are left to do a little healthy roughing it.

It took an appalling amount of toil to soften the yard into shape for agriculture. We discovered, after moving, that the whole block stood on “made land” which had been dumped into a hollow. But “land” is a relative term. Oh, yes; there is some sand and there are some pebbles and some rocks in the soil; but its richness and charm are in effete hardware, bed-springs, ashes, bottles, bones, oyster-shells, decayed wood, hoop-skirts, bird-cages, silk dresses, china—in fact, I do net think of many familiar objects that we have not extracted from our yard in spading up the flower-beds. We took up, at a depth of hardly more than a foot, a set of false teeth, (Archæologists to whom we showed these relics thought that they did not belong to the Indians.) At another time I extracted a piece of glass with a lovely soap-bubble effect on its surface, like that on the old tear-bottles and ointment-jars of Cyprus. It was not a tear-bottle,—I think it had held a grief too strong for tears when it was whole,—but ​the iridescence acquired in a few years under ground showed that one does not have to go to the east, nor even to the London fakirs, for opalescent glass. Nor does one have to go to the country for some greenery and flowers.