The south side was a gradation of buildings, from the two-story brick grocery on the west corner to the grandest of the stone mansions on the east.  With the exception of two or three houses built in the early history of the block, and occupied by obstinate old proprietors, it presented such a regularly ascending line of roofs, that a giant could have walked up stairs from one end to the other.  Although each house was built upon a plan peculiar to itself, and supposed to reflect the long-cherished views of the original owner, there were certain resemblances among them.  This was sometimes the effect of a jealous rivalry; sometimes of imitation.  In one dozen houses there was a costly struggle for supremacy in window curtains.  In another dozen, the harmless contest pertained to Grecian urns crowned with flowers, or dry dolphins, tritons, or naiads, rising from the bosoms of little gravel beds in miniature front yards.  In a third dozen, there was a perspective of broad iron balconies elegantly constructed for show, and sometimes put to hazardous use, on warm summer nights, by venturesome gentlemen with cigars, or ladies with fans.

About the middle of the block was a colony of doctors, who had increased, in five years, from two to ten.  Their march was eastward, and it could be calculated to a nicety how long it would be before the small black, gilt-lettered signs of their profession would press hard upon the great house at the corner.  Why they thus congregated together, unless with the friendly purpose of relieving each other’s patients in each other’s absence, and so saving humanity from sudden suffering and death, was a mystery to everybody but themselves.

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.