Boston Neighbours In Town and Out

HE TOOK OUT HIS EYEGLASS TO STUDY IT.
The author and the publishers desire to make acknowledgment to the publishers of the Century Magazine and of the New England Magazine for their courtesy in permitting the re-issue of certain stories which were originally published in these periodicals.
I should be glad to tell a story if I only knew one, but I don't. Some people say that one experience is as interesting as another, and that any real life is worth hearing about; but I think it must make some little difference who the person is. But if I really must tell one, and since you all have told yours, and such nice ones, and anything is better than nothing when we are kept in all the morning by a pouring rain, with nothing to do, because we came only for a week, and did not expect it to rain, I will try and tell you about our Tolstoi Club, because that was rather like a story—at least it might have been like one if things had turned out a little differently.
You know I live in a suburb of Boston, and a very charming, delightful one it is. I cannot call it by its real name, because I am going to be so very personal; so I will call it Babyland, which indeed people often do in fun. There never was such a place for children. The population is mostly under seven years old, for it was about seven years ago that young married people began to move into it in such numbers, because it is so healthy; but it was always a great place for them even when it was small. The old inhabitants are mostly grandfathers and grandmothers now, and enjoy it very much; but they usually go into town in the winter, with such unmarried children as they have left, to get a little change; for there is no denying that there is a sameness about it—the sidewalks are crowded with perambulators every pleasant day, and at our parties the talk is apt to run too much on nursery-maids, and milkmen and their cows, and drains, to be very interesting to those who have not learned how terribly important such things are. So in winter we—I mean the young married couples, of whom I am half a one—are left pretty much to our own devices.