entres for daily living, intercourse, and need. People
tend to towns; they cannot establish themselves in isolated
independence. Yet packing and stifling are a cruelty and a sin. I do
not believe there ought to be any human being so poor as to be
forced to such crowding. The very way we are going to live at the
Horseshoe, seems to me an individual solution of the problem. It
ought to come to pass that our towns should be built--and if built
already, wrongly, _thinned out_,--on this principle. People are
coming to learn a little of this, and are opening parks and squares
in the great cities, finding that there must be room for bodies and
souls to reach out and breathe. If they could only take hold of some
of their swarming-places, where disease and vice are festering, and
pull down every second house and turn it into a garden space, I
believe they would do more for reform and salvation than all their
separate institutions for dealing with misery after it is let grow,
can ever effect."

"O, why _can't_ they?" cried Rose. "There is money enough,
somewhere. Why can't they do it, instead of letting the cities grow
horrid, and then running away from it themselves, and buying acres
and acres around their country places, for fear somebody should come
too near, and the country should begin to grow horrid too?"

"Because the growing and the crowding and the striving of the city
_make_ so much of the money, little wife! Because to keep everybody
fairly comfortable as the world goes along, there could not be so
many separate piles laid up; it would have to be used more as it
comes, and it could not come so fast. If nobody cared to be very
rich, and all were willing to live simply and help one another, in
little 'horseshoe neighborhoods,' there wouldn't be so much that
looks like grand achievement in the world perhaps; but I think maybe
the very angels might show themselves out of the unseen, and bring
the glory of heaven into it!"

Kenneth's color came, and his eyes glowed, as he spoke these words
that burst into eloquence with the intensity of his meaning; and
Rosamond's face was holy-pale, and her look large, as she listened;
and they were silent for a minute or so, as the pony, of his own
accord, trotted deliberately on.

"But then, the beauty, and the leisure, and all that grows out of
them to separate minds, and what the world gets through the
refinement of it! You see the puzzle comes back. Must we never, in
this life,