When you meet with one pursuing Ways the lost have entered in, Working out his own undoing With his recklessness and sin; Think, if placed in his condition, Would a kind word be in vain, Or a look of cold suspicion Win thee back to truth again?
There are spots that bear no flowers, Not because the soil is bad, But the Summer's genial showers Never made their bosoms glad. Better have an act that's kindly Treated sometimes with disdain, Than, in judging others blindly, Doom the innocent to pain.
It was a block of yellow-brown houses in South Boston, looking as much like a sheet of gingerbread as anything.
An express-wagon had just backed up to No. 21 in that block, and the driver, unloosing ropes here and there, proceeded to unpack the luggage.
"What have we here?" exclaimed Mrs. Bacon, the downstairs tenant. "A menagerie, I do believe. Come here, John."
There was, indeed, on the very top of the load a gray horse that in the twilight looked very real till one noticed the rockers on which it stood. But there was a kennel with a live terrier's head at the window, a bird-cage with its fluttering tenant, a crib and high chair besides, suggesting that the folks in the other part might, in the language of Mrs. Bacon, "make music."
Now, the downstairs tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Bacon, were precise, orderly people, living, like many other city people, in desert-island fashion, and only hoping that everybody else would mind their own business. It had been for weeks their great comfort that the other part was unoccupied, and now this load of household goods brimming over with pets and their belongings was an unwelcome sight.
There were no young Bacons--no, indeed! Plants did not flourish in their shaded windows nor canary birds splash water from their tiny baths upon the clear glass. No dog barked a noisy welcome when his master returned at night. No cat purred in her mistress's lap. The housekeeping of the Bacons was a fight against dirt, dust, sunshine and noise; and somehow pets bring all these.
"Well, John," said Mrs. Bacon as she turned from the window and pulled the shade over the sacred glass, "there's an end to peace and quiet. We must keep the entry doors locked; and don't you be whistling round to attract a child. Give them an inch and they'll take an ell. If folks must have rocking horses and what goes with them, they ought to move into the country, where they will not be pestering other people."