stay till Somebody has had enough of you.

Mabel thinks I ought to enliven the account of my trip with descriptions
of scenery and the like. But a rock is a rock, and a field is a field,
and who wants to know whether a tree is elm or maple? I am not a
geological survey, and you can get mountains enough from Craddock. Not
that I am insensible to the beauties of Nature--as I have proved before
now. How often have I sat upon an eminence, and admiringly gazed at the
departing luminary as he sank slowly to rest, flooding hill and valley
with tints which a painter might strive in vain to reproduce! I would
have to sit there some time to see it all, for I have noticed that with
us the Sunset proper does not begin till after the Setting of the Sun is
finished. And when the distant mountains assumed a robe of royal purple,
and 'the death-smile of the dying day' lingered pathetically on the
horizon, my thoughts would soar to the Celestial City, and long to rest
themselves upon its pavement of liquid gold. I heard Dr. Chapin say
these last words at the first lecture I ever attended, and it struck my
infant intelligence that they ought to be preserved. And I too might be
a poet if I lived in the country, in constant communion with Nature,
abandoning my soul to her maternal caress. But alas, the stir, the
scramble, the mad whirl of city life, the debasing contact with low
material minds, the daily study of Prices Current, make even of me a
muckworm. Still, I might work up a brook or two after I get to the
woods, or expatiate on a seven-pound trout: my conscience forbids me to
weigh them higher, for I never saw any above three. And yet some men
will talk familiarly of ten-pounders!--Or I might analyze the mediaeval
garments of Hodge and his old Poll. As for the Wayback houses, they are
like any other habitations, only less of them, and few and far between:
Jim's is the best, and it is nothing to brag of. You can see much better
buildings any day on Broadway. The rural parts, as Lord Bacon observed,
are but a den of savage men. It is to see one of these, and resume the
interrupted process of civilizing him, that I am about starting on this
philanthropic journey, leaving my happy home and the advantages of a
metropolis. If the savage breast is open to ennobling influences, it
shall be soothed and charmed by the music of my discourse. What loftier,
more disinterested task than to reclaim the wanderer, and guide the
penitent in the way w