of
their insistence. Our calling list is not governed by locality, and we
can cut it as we wish without embarrassment. Choice is not so easy in
the suburb. There, willynilly, we must know our neighbors and be known
by them. Fortunately, in most instances they will be found to be of
the right sort, if not fully congenial.

The theater, too, must become rather a red-letter diversion than a
regular feature of our existence, if it has been so. Whatever
enthusiasm we may possess for the opera, an occasional visit, with its
midnight return, will soon come to satisfy us. Our pet lectures, club
life, participation in public affairs, frequent mail delivery,
convenience of shopping, two-minute car service, and freedom from time
tables--these suggest what we have to put behind us when we pass the
city gates.

It is also the part of wisdom not to forget that, though the country is
alive with delights for us when all nature is garbed in green and the
songbirds carol in the elms and maples, there cometh a time--if we are
of the north--when fur caps are in season, the coal scoop is in every
man's hand, the snow shovel splintereth, and the lawn mower is at rest.
Then it is that our allegiance to country life will be strained, if
ever--particularly if we have provided ourselves with a ten-minute walk
to the station. Wading through snow against a winter wind, we see the
"agreeable constitutional" of the milder days in a different light.

We should think of all these things, and of some sacrifices purely
personal. It is better to think now than after the moving man's bill
has come in. Reason as we may, regrets will come, perhaps loneliness.
But the compensations, if we have chosen wisely, will be increasingly
apparent, and we shall be the very exceptions of exceptions if, before
the second summer has passed, we are not wedded beyond divorce to the
new home.

Once determined upon forswearing urban residence, a multitude of
considerations arise. First of these is "Which place?" Our suburban
towns have been developed in two ways. Some are "made to order," while
others were originally rural villages but have come under metropolitan
influence. Living in the latter is likely to be less expensive, and
local life may have more of a distinctive character; but the husk of
the past is almost certain to be evident in the mixture of old and
modern houses and in a certain offish separation of the native and
incoming elements. The "ma