through the woods; and I am there, young and
blooming as ever, and what Beattie's 'Minstrel' saw and heard, I seem
to see and hear once more."

"I know not how it may be in cities," said the Squire; "but I have
often noticed in our villages, that the countryman gets laughed at for
his greenness. This never disturbed me. I have felt that we were
inferior to none of their village bloods. Better be green on the
surface than rotten at the core. And I have remembered how many great
men of the world were bred in the country."

"The cities are often guilty of the same," said William, "forgetting
how many angels they entertain unawares. Did ever a mortal man look
more of the rustic clown than the country boy, Sam Johnson, when he
first went to London? And could he not make dictionaries, and write
Rasselas?"

"And who can imagine a more ludicrous object," asked the Squire, "than
shabby, and chubby, and warty little Oliver Goldsmith, when he first
waddled, staring and gaping, through Green-Arbor Court, and up
Fishstreet Hill? And has he not given us prose and poetry that will
live as long as the English tongue is known?"

"We might have laughed at Shakspeare," added William, "when, a green
country runaway, he first entered the metropolis; we might have laughed
at Dryden, coming up from the provinces in his coarse Norwich drugget
and wooden shoes--over thirty years old, and not yet aware that he
could write a line of verse. But for all that, did not Shakspeare
write Hamlet? and Dryden give laws and models for English heroic verse?"

"And some might have thanked the Dumfries gentry for putting the rustic
Burns in the kitchen with the servants to eat," added the Squire; "but
did not Burns make a song there, to shame his proud insulters; and did
he not sing--

'A man's a man for a' that.'

The temptations of the city are the most that I should fear."

"They are many and great," said William; "and I do not wonder that so
many perish in the ordeal. Yet I know that people need not fall, if
they will open their eyes, and act out their country nature. Evil
affords a high and noble discipline when we meet it like men, and
overcome its onsets. When men and women from the country have finished
a course of city life, with warm hearts remaining in them, unsullied by
corruptions they have seen, they are found to possess all the more
strength of will, elevation of mind, and grace and grandeur of life,
from the school from