WE HAVE societies for the furtheranceof many ends which we consider desirable, and we have societies for the prevention of most things we consider undesirable. In fact, it seems impossible in this age for any two men to wish for the same state of affairs without uniting themselves into an association in the hope of bringing it about. Why not then have a Society for the Improvement of Our Back Yards ?

The necessity for such a combination all must admit who are familiar with city life. Walk through some streets lined with comfortable, even pretentious, houses, and you will find all in front neat and clean, with every possible adornment of windows and grass plots; growing palms, perhaps, on each side of the doorway of one house, flowers in the windows of another.

Yet is all this but a blind, a whitening of the sepulchre, a putting of the best foot foremost beyond all proper limits. Enter one of these same houses and take a view from an upper back window and what is there in the outlook to please the eye or cheer the mind ? A dreary, brick-bounded waste, sub-divided into smaller deserts by hideous board fences (inventions of the father of all ugliness in one of his most dyspeptic moods!), diversified by ash-barrels, trash-heaps and many other melancholy objects, and ornamented by a variety of tin cans and sardine boxes in all stages of oxidation, broken crockery and debris of every description. Here and there, perhaps, a stunted tree, or even a rose-bush, struggles into sight, as nature's feeble protest against the all-prevading ugliness, yet only serving to accentuate it, like a very small light in a very large darkness.

Even the houses themselves from this view partake of the general air of neglect. While the bricklayer's or the mason's art is exhausted in adorning so much of them as is visible from the street, the "alley facade," if I may be allowed the term, is alighted alike by architect, builder and tenant. If the design is to be skimped, and thought and drawing saved, it is here that the loss falls ; if bad bricks cr slovenly workmanship are to be put in to make the contract "pay," here is where it may safely be done. If shades, curtains or blinds must be economized, the householder - striving only for effect - thinks that the back windows will never be noticed. So all things conspire to render the region of back yards as ugly and depressing a landscape as could well be devised.

Fit tenant and presiding genius of this gloomy scene, the gaunt and hungry "alley cat" stalks from yard to yard over the wooden highways so kindly provided for his use, with an air of dark cynicism which such surroundings could not fail to engender, like an incarnate agent of that power which delights in all ugliness, material and spiritual. To him alone is the region congenial; to the lover of "sweetness and light " it is saddening in the extreme. Tell me, ye whose lot Fate has cast in our populous cities, has not the picture at least an air of verisimilitude ? Is it not familiar ?

Here is a field for mission work where each may labor in propria persona, and not by hireling proxies as in Ashantee and Timbuctoo. This land of darkness lies at your own doors, where each may judge of the need and of the means of reformation. If beauty be a means of grace (and who can doubt it ?), then it must follow that the converse is true, and that to live with such an outlook from our windows tends lower and bruteward.

Yet it is not only because of its effect on our characters, but as an indication of our characters, that such a state of affairs is deplorable. Why do we beautify and adorn our houses and our persons ? Because we love beauty and cleanliness for itself, or to impress others with our wealth or our good taste ? If you, Mr. Dirty-back-yard, were to be cast away, like Robinson Crusoe, on a desert island, would you cease washing your face because, foryour premises, which are so carefully cared for in front, is defensible on no other ground.

What is to be done to make so unfavorable a wilderness to blossom as the rose ? I admit and am conscious of the difficulties and limitations of the situation. Society has not yet reached that millennial state wherein communism in back yards will be a feasibility, so that the board fence, or some substitute therefore, must abide with us to vex our eyes. The rich, perhaps, may replace it with brick walls, which lend themselves more readily to the beautifying efforts of the amateur gardener, but to the moderately circumstanced and to the "decently poor," the only hope is in disguise.

Again, lines full of flopping clothes of varied hues are not only blots upon the fairest landscapes, but the heroic foot of Bridget the Hibernian, or Dido the Ethiop, is unfavorable to the development of tender vegetation. These flies are in the amber and must be suffered to remain. We must not expect complete success, but only qualified failure. But a dollar or two (not necessarily more), expended in hardy roses, vines or shrubs, added to a little intelligent labor - without which money is always useless - will suffice to convert your 20x50 feet of dreary, cat-haunted waste into the same extent of blooming cheerful garden ; to smother your unbearable board fences under a wealth of climbing roses, clematis, honeysuckle or what you will, to the great improvement of your own health and spirits, your better standing as a man and a citizen, and, as one garden infects a whole block, setting an example which your neighbors will be quick to follow, as every real missionary, whether he be lay or clerical, is bound in honor to do.