e and things in a great city had started the life
that was in them, so that it showed what manner of growth it was to
be of.

And little Hazel Ripwinkley had got hold already of the small end of
a very large problem.

But she could not make it out that this was the same old Boston
that her mother had told about, or where the nice neighbors were
that would be likely to have little tea-parties for their children.

VIII.

EAVESDROPPING IN ASPEN STREET.

Some of the old builders,--not the _very_ old ones, for they built
nothing but rope-walks down behind the hill,--but some of those who
began to go northwest from the State House to live, made a pleasant
group of streets down there on the level stretching away to the
river, and called them by fresh, fragrant, country-suggesting
names. Names of trees and fields and gardens, fruits and blossoms;
and they built houses with gardens around them. In between the
blocks were deep, shady places; and the smell of flowers was tossed
back and forth by summer winds between the walls. Some nice old
people stayed on there, and a few of their descendants stay on there
still, though they are built in closely now, for the most part, and
coarse, common things have much intruded, and Summit Street
overshadows them with its palaces.

Here and there a wooden house, set back a little, like this of the
Ripwinkleys in Aspen Street, gives you a feeling of Boston in the
far back times, as you go by; and here and there, if you could get
into the life of the neighborhood, you might perhaps find a
household keeping itself almost untouched with change, though there
has been such a rush and surge for years up and over into the newer
and prouder places.

At any rate, Titus Oldways lived here in Greenley Street; and he
owned the Aspen Street house, and another over in Meadow Place, and
another in Field Court. He meant to stretch his control over them as
long as he could, and keep them for families; therefore he valued
them at such rates as they would bring for dwellings; he would not
sell or lease them for any kind of "improvements;" he would not have
their little door-yards choked up, or their larger garden spaces
destroyed, while he could help it.

Round in Orchard Street lived Miss Craydocke. She was away again,
now, staying a little while with the Josselyns in New York. Uncle
Titus told Mrs. Ripwinkley that when Miss Craydocke came back it
would be a neighborhood, and they could go ro