difference, perhaps, that in
Devonshire, where they have people "staying" with them, the system is
rather more rigidly applied. The picnicking, if picnicking there is to be,
is done in town. They keep their best things in the country--their best
books, their best furniture, their best pictures--and their footing in
London is as provisional as ours is at our "summer retreats." The English
smile a good deal--or rather would smile a good deal if they had more
observation of it--at the fashion in which we American burghers stow
ourselves away for July and August in white wooden boarding-houses beside
dusty, ill-made roads. But it is fair to say that these improvised homes
are not immeasurably more barbaric than the human _entassement_ that takes
place in London "apartments" during the months of May and June. Whoever has
had unhappy occasion to look for lodgings at this period, and to explore
the mysteries of the little black houses in the West End which have a
neatly-printed card suspended in the door-light, will admit that from the
obligation to rough it our more luxurious kinsmen are not altogether
exempt. We rough it, certainly, more than they do, but we rough it in the
country, where Nature herself is rough, and they rough it in the heart of
the largest and most splendid of cities. In England, in the country, Nature
as well as civilization is smooth, and it seems perfectly consistent, even
at midsummer, to dress for dinner; albeit that when so costumed you cannot
conveniently lie on the grass. But in England you do not particularly
expect to lie on the grass, especially in the evening. The aspect of the
usual English country-houses sufficiently indicates the absence of that
informal culture of the open air into which the American _villeggiatura_
generally resolves itself; and one reason why I mentioned just now the
excellent dwelling which I visited in the rain was that, as I approached
it, it struck me as so good an example of all that, for American rural
purposes, a house should not be. It was indeed built of stone, or of brick
stuccoed over; which, as they say in England, is a "great pull." But except
that it was detached and gabled, it belonged quite to the class of city
houses. Its walls were straight and bare, and its windows, though wide,
were short. It might have been deposited in Belgravia without in the least
seeming out of place: it conformed to the rigid London model. It had no
external galleries, no breezy pia