ON LIVING IN THE COUNTRY.
THE eruption of red-brick villas, which spreads yearly wider over the home counties, like a new scarlet-fever, is a visible sign of the great change which has come over the habits of the London professional man in the course of the last ten years. Every morning a punctual crowd of frock- coated men in tall hats is deposited on the platforms of the great London stations, and every evening the same men, the majority now carrying the small " bass " bag which contains. the fish for dinner, again throng the outgoing trains which will take them to sleep in the country. "I hear you live in the country now," says one business man to another in the columns of an American comic paper. " No ; my wife and the children live in the country. / live on the cars." And unfortunately it is only by taking these perpetual journeys that London professional men can enjoy country life at all No one can call the passing of a few weeks of holiday in a farmhouse lodging "enjoying country life." To get the real true pleasure out of English country, you must live in the same place year after year, and the place must be, tempo- rarily at the very least, your own. There are no flowers so sweet as those which spring from the seed planted by the master of the house in his scanty leisure, and no vegetables half so good as those anxiously watered and tended in the Ion g summer even- ings to the manifest contempt of the gardener who remarks with an audible sniff "Master won't let them peas alone till he's drownded them outright." Indeed, the possibilities of delight in a garden are endless. aeen if its owner can only be in it in
the early morning and the late evening, with Saturday after- noons and an occasional whole day off thrown in. But it is not only in what are in the strictest sense of the word country pleasures that the man who lives out of town will be the gainer. His knowledge of men outside the narrow limits of his particular class will also be immensely widened. In London he may believe that the artisans and working men have, in a modified degree, the same tastes and amusements as he has himself ; in the country he knows that this is so. For every summer evening he sees the cottagers, after working hours, digging in their gardens and attending to their " lotments," while the younger men practise cricket, and the women sit outside their cottage doors " vor to chatty and zee yolks go by,"—the rustic equivalent to paying a round of calls. If, indeed, a man has had the good fortune to be brought up in the country, he will possess an invaluable knowledge of the class below him, for he will have mixed with it on an equality almost impossible in later life. Himself a dirty little imp of six or seven, he will have chased butter- flies with the village boys, and have felt a respect for the boys of eleven or so quite uninfluenced by the amount of their fathers' incomes. Did not those of the elder boys who were "not on my side, father," threaten to ravage the garden at midnight in revenge for some outbreak of "cockiness" on the part of their youthful neighbour ? This wider sympathy and comprehension between man and man may be put down as not one of the smallest of the advantages of living in the wuntry.
But there is always the wrong side of the tapestry, and two capital objections to life in the country come to mind at the moment. One is, of course, the weather, which invariably does the wrong thing at the wrong moment. "Providence," said the farmer, when told that Providence had sent the drought which was spoiling his root-crop, "Providence mostly does things wrong, but sometimes the Almighty is too mach for him." Unfortunately, the occasions when Providence is overcome in the matter of weather are few and far between. The other terrible drawback is the universal prevalence of the village spy. People who live on breezy commons or "in silent woody places" may be exempt from this plague, but it may almost be said that for the man who lives in a country village there is no such thing as privacy. Who knows or cares, if you live in London, how many joints of butcher's meat are consumed egery week at your dinner-table P In the country, on the con- taary, the local butcher will mention the fact to the cook next door, who will tell her mistress, who will tell the curate's wife when she comes to tea and muffins at half-past four. Miss Ferrier gives us in " Destiny " a picture illustrating this very point in village life, and it is as accurate now as it was wher it was drawn sixty years ago. One of her characters alwayt spends the morning hour when the tradesmen are making their rounds looking out of the parlour-window for the better convenience of spying on the purchases of the neighbours. on which he comments to his wife in the following terms Kitty, my dear, there's a leg of pork, a calf's head, and a rump steak gone to Mrs. Martha Budgell. What can she be doing with three meats ? Single lady—bad health— only two servants—very rich, to be sure—and three meats.
Very odd, ain't it, Kitty, my dear And there, there, I declare, is a delicate little turkey poult to Mr. Mogg. Sure there must be some mistake there ! white meat! white fowl !
Good la ! come here my dear, only see ! here's the fishmonger, and sure if he ain't taking a pair of soles to the Moggs l—well, this is the very strangest thing—ain't it,
Kitty, my dear to think of the Mogge, with three hundred thousand pound, having white meat, white fish, white fowl ! I declare I should not wonder if their soup was white too !" There are many men who find it realli impossible to live under the constant scrutiny of theit neighbours. They lead the most blameless and open of existences, and yet the knowledge that the petty details of their households are 1),..ing spied and commented on makes life absolutely intolerable to them. These sensitive people will certainly be more at ease as insignificant items in a crowd, than in the prominence of living in one out of the half-a-dozen "gentlemen's houses" in the ordinary English village. The London neighbour is too busy with his own work to care what is happening next door, while in the country there are sure to be people whose only way of killing time is to take a deep interest in the domestic
details of their own and others' lives. For whether be lives in the country or the town, man's great object during the whole of his short life is to kill time as effectually as possible by work or play, and he thinks that he has passed a well-spent day, who can say to himself at night, " What, evening already; I had no idea it was so late."
Of course, one great argument against living in the country is the absence of society. And if society must always mean parties in great houses, this is quite true. You cannot expect very young people to enjoy living all the year round in the country. In the summer, with tennis, picnics, boating, and now bicycling, the country is bearable enough,—but in winter "Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men." For the noise of a crowded room, the bright lights, the flowers, and the general air of gaiety are immense factors in the enjoyment of the very young. But for people whose pleasure in society consists in liking "good talk," the country is no such bad place. A country house party is one of the most favourable places for talk imaginable, and even the humble two or three guests, who are all the dweller in the small villa is able to assemble, will sometimes make con- versation decidedly worth listening to. But, it will be urged, where in the country can you meet people who will be worth inviting for the purposes of talk P And the answer must certainly be, "In London." Which brings us to the conclusion that the real way to make the most of country life is to be a Londoner, and to live in the country near enough to town to enjoy the society of London friends who will form at any rate a welcome seasoning to the indigenous neighbours. And if you can persuade some of your London friends to settle near you, your happiness will be greater still. This applies chiefly to the inhabitants of villadom. The man who inherits an estate of his own has duties and pleasures of quite a different kind, into which it is not proposed to enter here. But to be the contented inhabi- tant of a villa it is well to be a Londoner, to whom the mere escape from bricks and mortar will be a pleasure unknown to those who take country surroundings as a matter of course. Add to the pleasures more properly belonging to the country a certain amount of social life, partly supplied by London friends, and you will have the satisfaction to a very great extent of eating your cake and having it still.
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