Looking
back now, I think likely it was the contrast of its desolation with
the green hill and the fields I loved, of its darkness and human
misery and inefficiency with the valiant fighting men of my boyish
dreams, that so impressed me. I believe it because it is so now.
Over against the tenement that we fight in our cities ever rises
in my mind the fields, the woods, God's open sky, as accuser and
witness that His temple is being so defiled, man so dwarfed in body
and soul.
[Illustration: The View the Stork got of the Old Town]
I know that Rag Hall displeased me very much. I presume there must
have been something of an inquiring Yankee twist to my make-up,
for the boys called me "Jacob the delver," mainly because of my
constant bothering with the sewerage of our house, which was of
the most primitive kind. An open gutter that was full of rats led
under the house to the likewise open gutter of the street. That was
all there was of it, and very bad it was; but it had always been
so, and as, consequently, it could not be otherwise, my energies
spent themselves in unending warfare with those rats, whose nests
choked the gutter.
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