is we call luxury, and, compared with
the condition of the other rooms (before we had stripped them of their
contents), so it undoubtedly is. The walls of this boudoir of mine are
roughly whitewashed, the floor roughly boarded, and here I abide with my
chicks. The decided improvement in their health and looks and spirits,
since we left that horrible city, is a great deal better than sofas and
armchairs to me, or anything that would be considered elsewhere the mere
decencies of life; and having the means of privacy and cleanliness, my
only two absolute indispensables, I take this rather primitive existence
pleasantly enough. This house is built at the foot of a low hill, the
sides of which are cultivated; while the immediate summit retains its
beautiful crest of noble trees, from beneath which to look out over the
wide landscape is a very agreeable occupation towards sunset.

Chester County, as this is called, is the richest, agriculturally
speaking, in Pennsylvania; and the face of the country is certainly one
of the comeliest, well-to-do, smiling, pleasant earth's faces that can
be seen on a summer's day; the variety of the different tinted crops
(among them the rich green of the maize, or Indian corn, which we have
not in England), clothing the hill-sides and running like golden bays
into the green forest that once covered them from base to summit, and
still crowns every highest point, forms the gayest coat of many colors
for the whole rural region.

The human interest in the landscape is supplied not by village, mansion,
parsonage, or church, but by numerous small isolated farm-houses, their
white walls gleaming in the intense sunlight from amidst the trim
verdure of their orchards, and their large barns and granaries surveying
complacently far and wide the abundant harvests that are to be gathered
into their capacious walls. The comfort, solidity, loneliness, and
inelegance, not to say ugliness, of these rural dwellings is highly
characteristic, the latter quality being to a certain degree modified by
distance; the others represent very pleasingly, in the midst of the
prosperous prospect, the best features of the institutions which govern
the land--security, freedom, independence.

There is nothing visibly picturesque or poetical in the whole scene;
nothing has a hallowed association for memory, or an exciting historical
interest, or a charm for the imagination. But under this bright and
ever-shining sky the objec