loomed, you
cannot tell how. It is unexpectedly liberal, fresh, and innocent. The
soft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are, for the moment, genuine.

Another day and all is undone. The Rise is its daily self again--a road
of flowers and foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well-built
street. And if you happen to find the men at work on the
re-transformation, you become aware of the accident that made all this
difference. It lay in the little border of wayside grass which a row of
public servants--men with spades and a cart--are in the act of tidying
up. Their way of tidying it up is to lay its little corpse all along the
suburban roadside, and then to carry it away to some parochial dust-heap.

But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would reconcile everything. When
the first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered all
the colour of the world. It had been the brown and russet of
drought--very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became a
translucent, profound, and eager green. The citizen does not spend
attention on it.

Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; in
perception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, so
punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the
grass. The "sunny spots of greenery" are given just time enough to grow
and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade.
(To call that spade a spade hardly seems enough.)

For the gracious grass of the summer has not been content within
enclosures. It has--or would have--cheered up and sweetened everything.
Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded to
asphalte, taking leave to live and let live. It has taken the little
strip of ground next to the asphalte, between this and the kerb, and
again the refuse of ground between the kerb and the roadway. The man of
business walking to the station with a bag could have his asphalte all
unbroken, and the butcher's boy in his cart was not annoyed. The grass
seemed to respect everybody's views, and to take only what nobody wanted.
But these gay and lowly ways will not escape a vestry.

There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's grass will
attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple
slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has
put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has giv