It is not every one who can toss off his provocations with so good a grace as our correspondent, whose letter we insert:—
New York, April 19th.
Dear Mr. Beecher: Suppose you were fond of flowers and shrubs, and that the plat of Mother Earth allotted you was at the back of your city house, say about seventeen feet square,—the most of it occupied by the space for drying clothes; the rest a hard clayey soil, baked by the sun so quickly that you wish the Israelites might have had it to make brick, and one that no amount of foreign admixture improves.
Suppose the florist came every spring, hoed and raked, and distributed roses, verbenas, geraniums, and the like, at regular intervals, also sticks, bare evidence of the burial-place of various cherished bulbs that never come up, but seem, like your carnations, to disappear with the wheelbarrow.
Suppose the occupants of the tenement-house close to your rear fence,—who always, in all the stories of the day, nurse a geranium in a cracked pot,—instead of thanking you for the pleasant sight under their windows, garnished your bed with egg-shells, old paper collars, rags, bones, empty spools, and other débris handy for the purpose.
Suppose the nine thousand and ninety cats and their families roosted on the fence in the twilight, and tried their claws on your shrubs, and the softness of your soil generally, in the small hours of the night.
Suppose, with the first green leaves, the worms came also, and the green lice, and the ants, and made your bushes a sorrow and a vexation.
Suppose the hoop of the laundress was over it all, so to speak, and the hose always burst when the weather was dry, and your watering-pot held about a teacupful.
What would you do, Mr. Beecher? Would you give over the space to old shoes and ugliness, or would you fly in the face of manifest destiny and cultivate?
Dejectedly yours,