May was speaking truly in the mildness and
freshness of the air, in the slow passing of the light and expansive
cumuli across the wide blueness of the sky, in the grasses and dandelions
springing up among the stark weeds of last year that swayed and rustled
on every vacant lot. From her stand-point among the heaps of brick and
sand and yellow lumber that surrounded the site of the new house, Jane
saw the fronts or sides or backs of other new houses placed dispersedly
round about: their towers and turrets and porches and oriels and the
myriad other massive manifestations proper to the new Stone Age. Between
them and beyond them her eye took transversely the unkempt prairie as it
lay cut up by sketchy streets and alleys, and traversed by street-car
tracks and rows of lamp-posts and long lines of telegraph poles and the
gaunt framework of an elevated road. In one direction she saw above the
dead crop of rustling weeds the heads of a long line of people on their
way to church; in the other direction, the distant clang of a passing
gong drew her eye to the vast advertisement which glared in the sun from
the four-story flank of an outlying shoe-store. "I hope the next man who
builds will shut _that_ out," she thought.
Presently a light buggy drove up to the curbstone, and a large, stout man
within it squeezed his way out carefully between its muddy wheels. Then
with a jerk he landed his hitching-weight in the roadway, clicked the
catch in the end of its strap to the ring at his horse's bit, and
advanced towards the house.
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