Exeter Place--The Country--Friendship--Pleasant Traits--Some Letters.
EXETER Place, into which the family moved, is terminated by a huge trellis, substantially built against the end wall of a house. This is covered by creeping plants, which take their rise in a diminutive railed space in the shape of a triangle, with a waterless fountain like an epergne in the centre. The end of the lane looks like a theatre-flat which has performed the garden-scene during several highly melodramatic seasons. A Flora stands there, as if for a label, to prevent misconception in the civic mind and to enforce rurality, which she does in melancholy fashion. It was a poor substitute for the woods and fields of West Roxbury. Mr. Parker languished for the natural scenes to which he had been from birth accustomed: next to books, they were essential to his comfort and happiness. He used to anticipate his summer vacations, when for several years the family would return to the house at Spring Street, with childlike delight; every spring he began to time the blossoming of the shrubs and trees, and to tell over what he should be too late for and what he should find. It was a sore disappointment if he did not get out of town in season for the apple-blossoms, but his
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