are very apt to overlook. One is, that their guests like to be made
at home, and treated with confidence; and another is, that people
are always interested in the details of a way of life that is new to
them. The Englishman comes to America as weary of his old, easy,
family-coach life as you can be of yours: he wants to see something
new under the sun,--something American; and forthwith we all bestir
ourselves to give him something as near as we can fancy exactly like
what he is already tired of. So city people come to the country, not
to sit in the best parlor and to see the nearest imitation of city
life, but to lie on the haymow, to swing in the barn, to form intimacy
with the pigs, chickens, and ducks, and to eat baked potatoes,
exactly on the critical moment when they are done, from the oven of
the cooking-stove,--and we remark, _en passant_, that nobody has ever
truly eaten a baked potato unless he has seized it at that precise
and fortunate moment.

I fancy you now, my friends, whom I have in my eye. You are three
happy women together. You are all so well that you know not how it
feels to be sick. You are used to early rising, and would not lie in
bed if you could. Long years of practice have made you familiar with
the shortest, neatest, most expeditious method of doing every
household office, so that really, for the greater part of the time in
your house, there seems to a looker-on to be nothing to do. You rise
in the morning and dispatch your husband, father, and brothers to the
farm or wood-lot; you go sociably about chatting with each other,
while you skim the milk, make the butter, turn the cheeses. The
forenoon is long; it's ten to one that all the so-called morning work
is over, and you have leisure for an hour's sewing or reading before
it is time to start the dinner preparations. By two o'clock your
housework is done, and you have the long afternoon for books,
needlework, or drawing,--for perhaps there is among you one with a
gift at her pencil. Perhaps one of you reads aloud while the others
sew, and you manage in that way to keep up with a great deal of
reading. I see on your bookshelves Prescott, Macaulay, Irving, besides
the lighter fry of poems and novels, and, if I mistake not, the
friendly covers of the "Atlantic." When you have company, you invite
Mrs. Smith or Brown or Jones to tea: you have no trouble--they come
early, with their knitting or sewing; your particular crony sits with
you by your