high and low, so desirable for "pie-fodder," and daisies and ferns in
abundance, and, in an adjoining meadow by the brookside, the cardinal
flower and the blue gentian. All these simple pleasures seem better to
me than sitting in heated, crowded rooms listening to interminable
music, or to men or women who never know when to stop, or rushing round
to gain more information on anything and everything from Alaska to
Zululand, and wildly struggling to catch up with "social duties."

City friends, looking at the other side of the shield, marvel at my
contentment, and regard me as buried alive. But when I go back for a
short time to the old life I am fairly homesick. I miss my daily visit
to the cows and the frolic with the dogs. All that has been unpleasant
fades like a dream.

I think of the delicious morning hours on the broad vine-covered piazza,
the evenings with their starry splendor or witching moonlight, the
nights of sound sleep and refreshing rest, the all-day picnics, the
jolly drives with friends as charmed with country life as myself, and I
weary of social functions and overpowering intellectual privileges, and
every other advantage of the metropolis, and long to migrate once more
from Gotham to Gooseville.

"Dear country life of child and man!
For both the best, the strongest,
That with the earliest race began,
And hast outlived the longest,
Their cities perished long ago;
Who the first farmers were we know."