Rus in Urbe

— In the very heart of a city, — not a great, city, truly, but yet a city where the bustle of traffic pervades the streets with a wearisome persistency of sound, — I know a stately old house standing at the intersection of two main thoroughfares. Around that corner the street cars, all day long and far into the night, keep up their deafening rumble ; and bells and whistles and the town clock’s hourly clamor proclaim an incessant strife against quietude. But never a rural voice greets the ear ; even the sparrow’s shrill chirp, the one bird-note of the precinct, accommodates itself so inextricably to —

that no reminiscence of bosky dells and jubilant babble of water follows the flight of those ubiquitous wings. And never a rural sight charms the eye : trees there are, indeed, along the sidewalk, but trees so forlornly gray with the dust of the trampled city offer no suggestion of “ a green thought in a green shade.”

At the back of the house is a little square court shut off from the street by a brick wall some fourteen feet high, in which a low door serves the twofold purpose of a gate and a watchman ; for never do the hinges turn but the petulant alarum of a sharply imperative bell mingles with the city’s innumerous voices. The opposite side of the cort is bounded by a wing extending from main building, and meeting at right angles another brick wall, the court’s southern boundary, that rises to the height of the wing’s upper piazza. The little court, stone-paved, is of the city, and echoes all day long to the discordant cries of the street, the spasmodic jangle of the gate-bell, and the tread of hurrying feet within and without ; but that high wall forming the barrier against the lot beyond is draped from base to coping-stone with a rampant growth of Virginia creeper, which, being sheltered to some extent from the street, escapes the dust that chokes the trees, and flourishes greenly, an exuberant oasis in a desert of brick and mortar.

Deep in the covert of this verdure was shrouded once a mystery of the remote dense woodland ; for here one of the shy furry folk, rash emigrant from sylvan solitudes, had her home and reared her young, long unseen, undreamed of, in the crowded street. Embowered within this vimineous screen, she couched inert by day, secure from espial ; but when the city’s “ darkness visible” came on, she must, poor hungerdriven prowler, many a time have quitted this snug nook,

returning in the dawn’s glimmer, aweary but unchallenged.

It was by one of those chances attendant upon the improvements of civilization that at last her unsuspected lurking-place was brought to light. The fiat went forth, on a certain morning, that the tangling vine must be shorn of its superfluity of ramge, and lo ! the Mink and her progeny were unveiled to the shouting wonderment of the hangers-on about that little courtyard.

When? Whence? How? Wherefore? These were questions eagerly debated.

When ? Weeks agone ; that was manifest. But whence, and how ? It is true that close upon this city’s limits the woods grow wild and thick, and are populous with creatures averse to man ; but through what perils of many a suburban street, where stone-throwing boys most do congregate, and dogs, alert, inimical, abound, — risks against which even “ the blanket of the dark ” offers no absolute security, — had this reckless vagrant made her way unscathed, to rear her offspring “ in the midst of alarms ” ? And wherefore ? Hardest question of all ! What feuds among her own kind, what thirst of travel, what spirit of adventure, what desperate quest of fortune, had impelled her towards the busy haunts of men ? Or was it, perchance, some taint of that strange and tragic malady, a loss of identity, that sent her roving far from kith and kin and her familiar thickets ? But from whatever cause she forsook her native wilds, was it the inerrancy of instinct, or some gracious freak of chance that directed her through the city’s alien maze to this rare green bower hedged in by homes of men ?

But could we pluck out the heart of the mystery, how much of the charm of this idyl of a city corner would be lost ! A mystery in its beginning, a mystery it remains in its ending ; for even as the mink’s arrival had been effected in deepest secrecy, so likewise was her departure — with all her little family — achieved, despite the watch set upon her. By some wary magic known to the canny woodfolk, she contrived to elude her spies, who, in wrath at being outwitted by these “wildings of Nature,” anathematized the happy-go-lucky mother and her brood as “vermin of the swamp.”

But she had my sympathies, that mother ; and I trust it was her good hap to win to the friendly forest glooms and soothing silences, with her city-born babes unharmed.