THE GLORY OF THE WEST.
Now let us close our glasses, fold our camp-chairs, and go back to the camp, our present home. As we turn into the gate another voice strikes our ear, louder, richer, more attention-compelling than any we have heard. Listen: It is the wonder and the glory of the West; it is the most intoxicating, the most soul-stirring of bird voices in the land where thrushes are absent; it embodies the solitude, the vastness, the mystery of the mesa; it is the western meadow lark. This is his nesting-time, and we may be treated to his love-song, the exquisite, whispered aria he addresses to his mate. As I have heard it when very close to him, he sings his common strain several times, and then drops to a very low twittering and trilling warble, in which now and then is interpolated a note or two of the usual score, yet the whole altogether different in spirit and execution. He ends by a burst into the loud carol he offers to the world. There is nothing beyond that to hear, even in my beloved nook.
XI.
THE IDYL OF AN EMPTY LOT.
A CITY STUDY.
Opposite my study windows is an empty lot. It is of generous size; six residences facing another street, with high board fences, stretch across the back; a large apartment-house towers above it on the right, and a tight fence defines it on the left. The front is open to the street, but the whole is so given up to weeds, such a tangle of rank vegetation, that few people penetrate it, and it is the great out-of-doors for the animal life of the neighborhood. Looking down upon it as I do, constantly spread out under my windows, I cannot choose but see everything that goes on.
Last summer was the blossoming-time of the empty lot. It had but one summer of romance—just one—between the building of the brick row behind it and the beginning of the new row which shall hide it from the sun for ages, perhaps.
A RELAPSE INTO BARBARISM.
It was not attractive in the spring, for man had done what he could to deface it. Here is a curious fact: the human being is capable of a certain amount of civilization under the pressure of the necessities of city life. He—or she—will learn to dispose inoffensively of the waste and rubbish that drag after him like a trail wherever he goes. He—and always likewise she—can be taught to burn his waste paper, to bag his rags, to barrel his ashes, to burn the refuse from his table, to hide the relics of china and glass. In fact, he can live in a modern house with no back yard, no "glory-hole" whatever.