"I cannot. It would break his heart."
CHAPTER III
An Old Family Servant
The colonel's front yard, while as quaint and old-fashioned as his house, was not—if I may be allowed—quite so well bred.
This came partly from the outdoor life it had always led and from its close association with other yards that had lost all semblance of respectability, and partly from the fact that it had never felt the refining influences of the friends of the house; for nobody ever lingered in the front yard who by any possibility could get into the front door—nobody, except perhaps now and then a stray tramp, who felt at home at once and went to sleep on the steps.
That all this told upon its character and appearance was shown in the remnants of whitewash on the high wall, scaling off in discolored patches; in the stagger of the tall fence opposite, drooping like a drunkard between two policemen of posts; and in the unkempt, bulging rear of the third wall,—the front house,—stuffed with rags and tied up with clothes-lines.
If in the purity of its youth it had ever seen better days as a garden—but then no possible stretch of imagination, however brilliant, could ever convert this miserable quadrangle into a garden.
It contained, of course, as all such yards do, one lone plant,—this time a honeysuckle,—which had clambered over the front door and there rested as if content to stay; but which later on, frightened at the surroundings, had with one great spring cleared the slippery wall between, reached the rain-spout above, and by its helping arm had thus escaped to the roof and the sunlight.
It is also true that high up on this same wall there still clung the remains of a criss-cross wooden trellis supporting the shivering branches of an old vine, which had spent its whole life trying to grow high enough to look over the tall fence into the yard beyond; but this was so long ago that not even the landlord remembered the color of its blossoms.
Then there was an old-fashioned hydrant, with a half-spiral crank of a handle on its top and the curved end of a lead pipe always aleak thrust through its rotten side, with its little statues of ice all winter and its spattering slop all summer.