people whose love for the modern carries them even farther than this, and who take a pride in planting damp and comfortless homes in the very centre of wild, unfinished neighbourhoods. Who are they? Have they human form and shape, with minds and hearts; or are they, as I have often suspected, merely window-blinds? If they are not policemen and laundresses in charge of bare walls and echoing passages; if they are not hired housekeepers put in to bait the trap, and catch unwary tenants; if they are not restless spirits, who, for an abatement of rent, are always willing to lead the advanced posts in suburban colonization,—whence springs that singular ambition which is always anxious to be literally first in the field, and the oldest inhabitant in a settlement of yesterday? Surely, there can be little pleasure in living, for months, amongst heaps of brick-dust, shavings, mortar and wet clay; in staring at hollow shops that are boarded up for years until they are wanted, and at undecided mansions which may turn out to be public-houses; or in being stared at, in a tenfold degree, by rows of spectral carcases and yawning cellars? There can be little pleasure in contemplating cold stucco porticos of a mongrel Greek type, that crack and fall to pieces in rain and frost; or gaping gravel-pits; or stagnant ponds; or lines of oven-like foundations waiting for more capital and more enterprise to cover them with houses. There can be just as little pleasure in seeing your scanty pavement breaking suddenly off before your door, and your muddy, hilly road tapering away in a few rotten planks that lead into a marshy, grassless field, where you may stand and easily fancy yourself the last man at the end of a melancholy, unsuccessful, deserted world, looking into space, with no one person or thing behind you.
The old places that I shall always cling to are unhappily often visited by decay; but it is the decay of ripe old age, which is always venerable. My ideal toy-house—the nearest approach to it that I can find—may become uninhabitable in the fulness of years, but it will still be picturesque; and those who may despise it as a dwelling will admire it upon canvas. In this form it is often brought within my humble reach, and I secure the shadow if I cannot obtain the substance. I still, however, look longingly at the reality, as my little girl looked at her toy-house in her morning's walk; and, like her, I shall doubtless be swept past it, still looking back, until I am sucked into that countless crowd from which there is no returning.
