A life whose parlors have always been closed.

IK MARVEL.


Sunshine is tabooed in the front room of the house. The "damp
dignity" of the best-room has been well described: "Musty smells,
stiffness, angles, absence of sunlight. What is there to talk about
in a room dark as the Domdaniel, except where one crack in a
reluctant shutter reveals a stand of wax flowers under glass, and a
dimly descried hostess who evidently waits only your departure to
extinguish that solitary ray?"

At a recent auction I obtained twenty-one volumes of State Agricultural
Reports for seventeen cents; and what I read in them of the Advantages
of Rural Pursuits, The Dignity of Labor, The Relation of Agriculture to
Longevity and to Nations, and, above all, of the Golden Egg, seem
decidedly florid, unpractical, misleading, and very little permanent
popularity can be gained by such self-interested buncombe from these
eloquent orators.

The idealized farmer, as he is depicted by these white-handed
rhetoricians who, like John Paul, "would never lay hand to a plow,
unless said plow should actually pursue him to a second story, and then
lay hands on it only to throw it out of the window," and the phlegmatic,
overworked, horny-handed tillers of the soil are no more alike than
Fenimore Cooper's handsome, romantic, noble, and impressive red man of
the forest and the actual Sioux or Apache, as regarded by the cowboy of
the West.