vity of
individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff-dwelling--"The
Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgiliance--A division in
the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and
card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry--
Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the
cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr.
Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of
jolly.

That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality than
any other with which we became conversant while in England. With the
exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only experience
vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time we lived in
lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The boarding-houses of England
are like other boarding-houses; the hotels, or inns, in the middle of
the last century, were for the most part plain and homely compared with
what we have latterly been used to; but the English lodging-house system
had peculiarities. You enjoyed independence, but you paid for it with
inconveniences. The owner of the house furnished you with nothing except
the house, with its dingy beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything
else necessary to existence you got for yourself. You made your own
contracts with butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and
lighting. Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill
for the rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or
of the pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you
must do it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so
dingy, the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes
bed, always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions
which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic
moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English
lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the average
man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the imagination of
statisticians. And if the environment shows the man, one cannot help
rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's forming the
average man's acquaintance.

There was nothing peculiar about rented houses in England beyond the
innate peculiarities attaching to them as English. If the house were
unfurnished, and you had leisure to pick and choose, you might suit