ish
neighborhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles,
there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his
life. I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country, but
each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I
am speaking of and going to introduce you to very particularly; for on
this subject I must be prosy; so those that don't care for England in
detail may skip the chapter.

THE OLD BOY MOURNETH OVER YOUNG ENGLAND.

O young England! young England! You who are born into these racing
railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight
every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground
for three pound ten,[22] in a five weeks' holiday, why don't you know
more of your own birthplaces? You're all in the ends of the earth it
seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar
for midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not. Going round
Ireland, with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of
Tennyson on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in
Oxford racing-boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you
turn the steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden,
surrounded by the last batch of books from Mudie's Library, and half
bored to death.

[22] #Three pound ten# (shillings): the English shilling is
about twenty five cents, and the pound may be called five
dollars.

Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or
less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and
have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high
art, and all that; have seen the pictures at Dresden[23] and the
Louvre,[24] and know the taste of sauer-kraut.[25] All I say is, you
don't know your own lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be
chock-full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find
the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis,[26] which grows in the next wood or on
the down[27] three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are
good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old
gable-ended farm-houses, the place where the last skirmish was fought
in the civil wars,[28] where the parish butts[29] stood, where the
last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid[30] by
the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.

[23] #Dresden#: a city of