AT first the two yards were as much alike as the two houses, each house
being the exact copy of the other. They were just two of those little
red brick dwellings that one is always seeing side by side in the
outskirts of a city, and looking as if the occupants must be alike too.
But these two families were quite different. Mr. Gilton, who lived in
one, was a pretty cross sort of man, and was quite well-to-do, as cross
people sometimes are. He and his wife lived alone, and they did not have
much going out and coming in, either. Mrs. Gilton would have liked more
of it, but she had given up thinking about it, for her husband had said
so many times that it was women's tomfoolery to want to have people,
whom you weren't anything to and who weren't anything to you, ringing
your doorbell all the time and bothering around in your
dining-room,--which of course it was; and she would have believed it if
a woman ever did believe anything a man says a great many times.
In the other house there were five children, and, as Mr. Gilton said,
they made too large a family, and they ought to have gone somewhere
else. Possibly they would have gone had it not been for the fence; but
when Mr. Gilton put it up and Mr. Bilton told him it was three inches
too far on his land, and Mr. Gilton said he could go to law about it,
expressing the idea forcibly, Mr. Bilton was foolish enough to take his
advice. The decision went against him, and a good deal of his money went
with it, for it was a long, teasing lawsuit, and instead of being three
inches of made ground it might have been three degrees of the Arctic
Circle for the trouble there was in getting at it. So Mr. Bilton had to
stay where he was.
It was then that the yards began to take on those little differences
that soon grew to be very marked. Neither family would plant any vines
because they would have been certain to heedlessly beautify the other
side, and consequently the fence, in all its primitive boldness, stood
out uncompromisingly, and the one or two little bits of trees grew
carefully on the farther side of the enclosure so as not to be mixed up
in the trouble at all. But Mr. Gilton's grass was cut smoothly by the
man who made the fires, while Mr. Bilton only found a chance to cut his
himself once in two weeks. Then, by and by, Mr. Gilton bought a red
garden bench and put it under the tree that was nearest to the fence. No
one ever went out and sat on it, to be sure, but to the Bilton children
it represented the visible flush of prosperity. Particularly was Cora
Cordelia wont to peer through the fence and gaze upon that red bench,
thinking it a charming place in which to play house, ignorant of the
fact that much of the red paint would have come off on her back. Cora
Cordelia was the youngest of the five. All the rest had very simple
names,--John, Walter, Fanny, and Susan,--but when it came to Cora
Cordelia, luxuries were beginning to get very scarce in the Bilton
family, and Mrs. Bilton felt that she must make up for it by being
lavish, in one direction or another. She had wished to name Fanny, Cora,
and Susan, Cordelia, but she had yielded to her husband, and called one
after his mother and one after herself, and then gave both her favorite
names to the youngest of all. Cora Cordelia was a pretty little girl,
prettier even than both her names put together.
After the red bench came a quicksilver ball, that was put in the middle
of the yard and reflected all the glory of its owner, albeit in a
somewhat distorted form. This effort of human ingenuity filled the
Bilton children with admiration bordering on awe; Cora Cordelia spent
hours gazing at it, until called in and reproved by her mother for
admiring so much things she could not afford to have. After this, she
only admired it covertly.
Small distinctions like these barbed the arrows of contrast and
comparison and kept the disadvantages of neighborhood ever present.
Then, it was a constant annoyance to have their surnames so much alike.
Matters were made more unpleasant by mistakes of the butcher, the
grocer, and so on,--Gilton, 79 Holmes Avenue, was so much like Bilton,
77 Holmes Avenue. Gilton changed his butcher every time he sent his
dinner to Bilton; and though the mistakes were generally rectified,
neither of the two families ever forgot the time the Biltons ate,
positively ate, the Gilton dinner, under a misapprehension.
