The north side lacked variety. One part of it, comprising twenty lots,
had been built up on speculation by an enterprising landowner. The
houses were precisely alike, from coal cellar to chimney top, with front
railings of exactly the same pattern, crowned with iron pineapples from
the same mould, encompassing little plots of ground laid out in walks
similar to the fraction of a hair; the sole ornaments of which were four
little spruce trees, planted at equal distances apart.
This row of houses was very distracting even to the occupants, with whom
it was a feat of arithmetic to identify their homes in the daytime, and
much more so at night, when the landmarks were shadowy and
indistinguishable. Occasionally, well-meaning tenants found themselves
pulling at wrong doorbells; and there was one man who got tipsy every
Saturday night, and rang himself quite through the row before he tumbled
in on his own hall carpet. It was in counting the spruce trees, he said,
which had a perplexing way of doubling, that he invariably lost
the track.
In nearly every house on this block there was a piano.
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