VIII. 
CITY GARDENS. 
Every one does not leave the city in summer, and many 
who go spend only a few of the hottest weeks at the sea¬ 
shore or among the mountains, leaving a wide expanse of 
summer that, although passed between brick walls, is in 
many respects the most comfortable portion of it. The 
season is endured, however, rather than enjoyed, and one 
reason of this is that so little provision is made for any 
of the beauty that belongs to the time of leaf and flower ; 
so few traps are laid to catch sunbeams that are ready to 
fall into the most carelessly spread snares. 
The popular idea of summer in the city is represented by 
a palm-leaf fan and a pitcher of ice water, banks of green¬ 
ness or buds and blossoms being generally regarded as ut¬ 
terly foreign to the situation. A city back yard is apt to 
be only a dismal trysting-place for cats, walled in with ugly 
fences and adorned with perpetual relays of wet clothes, 
while the front inclosure, with its stereotyped parallelograms 
of grass and monumental urn, suggests a well-kept grave. 
As a background to this, unclothed walls of brick fling back 
with savage force the fierce vertical rays of sunshine, and 
naked iron or stone railings shut in empty little balconies, 
admirably calculated to hold not only flowers that are lovely 
to the eye, but thickets of green, living sponges that absorb 
and diffuse a grateful moisture, peculiarly acceptable under 
an aspiring American thermometer with a passion for the 
nineties. 
