come up from New York to spend a holiday, and did not rightly know
what to do with themselves in the country. There are staid and
respectable mansions that never move from the even tenor of their
ways; and there are houses that change their fashions every season,
putting on a new coat of paint every spring; and there is one that
dresses itself out in summer with so many flags and streamers that
one might imagine Fourth of July lived there.

All nations and all eras appear also to be gathered here. There are
Swiss cottages with overhanging chambers, and Italian villas with
flat roofs, and Gothic structures with incipient spires that look as
though they had stopped in their childhood and never got their
growth, and Grecian temples with rows of wooden imitations of marble
pillars of Doric architecture, and one house in which all nations
and eras combine--a Grecian porch, a Gothic roof, an Italian L, and a
half finished tower of the Elizabethan era, capped with a Moorish
dome, the whole approached through the stiffest of all stiff avenues
of evergreens, trimmed in the latest French fashion. That is Mr.
Wheaton's residence, the millionaire of Wheathedge. I wish I could
say he was as Catholic as his dwelling house.

I never fancied the country. Its numerous attractions were no
attractions to me. I cannot harness a horse. I am afraid of a cow. I
have no fondness for chickens--unless they are tender and
well-cooked. Like the man in parable, I cannot dig. I abhor a hoe. I
am fond of flowers but not of dirt, and had rather buy them than
cultivate them. Of all ambition to get the earliest crop of green
peas and half ripe strawberries I am innocent. I like to walk in my
neighbor's garden better than to work in my own. I do not drink
milk, and I do drink coffee; and I had rather run my risk with the