12 NATURE IN A CITY YARD 



over to be sure I had heard aright. He 

 was walking in a park on a balmy day, 

 delighting in the May-time budding and 

 twitter, when he met an acquaintance who 

 was taking a short cut across the park from 

 his house to his shop. After the man- 

 ner of our kind, my friend nodded to the 

 tradesman, and said it was a fine morning. 

 The tradesman looked up in a casual way, 

 as if he had heard the statement before 

 and agreed to it ; then, catching a glimpse 

 of the blue, as he raised his head out 

 of his commercial meditations, he asked, 

 " That 's what you call the sky, is n't it ? " 

 And he was sincere about it, apparently. 



One of the occasional benefits of town 

 life is the chance to get up into the fifteenth 

 or twentieth story of one of our office-build- 

 ings and look at the sky. It does not 

 strain your neck in that way. It is nearly 

 equivalent to being on a hill-top. It makes 

 us feel as if some oxygen had suddenly en- 

 tered the atmosphere, and as if we had 

 found room to open our lungs. Our im- 

 aginations feel the widening of our envi- 

 ronment, and our eyes are so constantly 



