and smile at the eloquence of Urbs, who pities their exile and depicts
the charm of streets. Streets are charming, respond Edwin and Angelina
in connubial chorus, but we will have none of them. Fond, foolish
pair! For even at that moment the desolating spirit of improvement is
staking out a street across their most emerald lawn and through their
most sacred grove; their trees and flowers and turf are doomed, and
their seclusion is to be turned into a dusty highway.

Suburban improvement is the ruthless devastator of home. There is no
remedy. To oppose the ruin of the place which you have carefully made,
which has grown around you in increasing beauty with the growth and
development of your family, which is associated with all that is
happiest in your life, and which is in some sort the flowering and
expression of yourself, is to be derided as withstanding the public
benefit and the advantage of those less fortunate than yourself. The
instinct of protecting the home that you have made is denounced as
sentimental selfishness, and the law steps forward, cuts down your
trees, plows up your lawn, lays a gutter under your window, destroys
your home, and hands you some dollars for what it calls compensation,
or demands them for what it styles improvement.

I am of opinion, therefore, says Mr. Tibs, and the Easy Chair commends
the reflection to those intending matrimony and thinking of a country
home, that there are some serious objections to a suburban residence.




RIP VAN WINKLE.