all important purchases,
for all their rarest pleasures, and all their most prized and memorable
opportunities.

Cities, and the immediate neighborhood of cities, are rapidly becoming
the chosen residences of the enterprising, successful, and intelligent.
As might be supposed, the movement works both ways: the locomotive
facilities carry citizens into the country, as well as countrymen into
the city. But those who have once tasted the city are never wholly
weaned from it, and every citizen who moves into a village-community
sends two countrymen back to take his place. He infects the country with
civic tastes, and acts as a great conductor between the town and the
country. It is apparent, too, that the experience of ten years, during
which some strong reaction upon the centripetal tendencies of the
previous ten years drove many of the wealthy and the self-supposed
lovers of quietude and space into the country, has dispersed several
very natural prejudices, and returned the larger part of the truants
to their original ways. One of these prejudices was, that our ordinary
Northern climate was as favorable to the outdoor habits of the leisurely
class as the English climate; whereas, besides not having a leisurely
class, and never being destined to have any, under our wise
wealth-distributing customs, and not having any out-door habits, which
grow up only on estates and on hereditary fortunes, experience has
convinced most who have tried it that we have only six months when
out-of-doors allows any comfort, health, or pleasure away from the city.
The roads are sloughs; side-walks are wanting; shelter is gone with the
leaves; non-intercourse is proclaimed; companionship cannot be found;
leisure is a drug; books grow stupid; the country is a stupendous bore.
Another prejudice was the anticipated economy of the country. This has
turned out to be, as might have been expected, an economy to those who
fall in with its ways, which citizens are wholly inapt and unprepared to
do. It is very economical not to want city comforts and conveniences.
But it proves more expensive to those who go into the country to want
them there than it did to have them where they abound. They are not to
be had in the country at any price,--water, gas, fuel, food, attendance,
amusement, locomotion in all weathers; but such a moderate measure of
them as a city-bred family cannot live without involves so great an
expense, that the expected economy of life in