is utterly impossible to predict where they will
be living in five years. Indeed, as you are the worst of correspondents,
I only learned your present address, by sheer accident, from a perfect
stranger, and he told me, of course, that you had plans for going
somewhere else, but where that might be he knew not. The civilized
English nomad is usually, like yourself, a person of independent means,
rich enough to bear the expenses of frequent removals, but without the
cares of property. His money is safely invested in the funds, or in
railways; and so, wherever the postman can bring his dividends, he can
live in freedom from material cares. When his wife is as unsettled as
himself, the pair seem to live in a balloon, or in a sort of Noah's ark,
which goes whither the wind lists, and takes ground in the most
unexpected places.

Have you ever studied the effect of localities on the mind--on your own
mind? That which we are is due in great part to the accident of our
surroundings, which act upon us in one or two quite opposite ways.
Either we feel in harmony with them, in which case they produce a
positive effect upon us, or else we are out of harmony, and then they
drive us into the strangest reactions. A great ugly English town, like
Manchester, for instance, makes some men such thorough townsmen that
they cannot live without smoky chimneys; or it fills the souls of others
with such a passionate longing for beautiful scenery and rustic
retirement, that they find it absolutely necessary to bury themselves
from time to time in the recesses of picturesque mountains. The
development of modern landscape-painting has not been due to habits of
rural existence, but to the growth of very big and hideous modern
cities, which made men long for shady forests, and pure streams, and
magnificent spectacles of sunset, and dawn, and moonlight. It is by this
time a trite observation that people who have always lived in beautiful
scenery do not, and cannot, appreciate it; that too much natural
magnificence positively crushes the activity of the intellect and that
its best effect is simply that of refreshment for people who have not
access to it every day. It happens too, in a converse way, that rustics
and mountaineers have the strongest appreciation of the advantages of
great cities, and thrive in them often more happily than citizens who
are born in the brick streets. Those who have great facilities for
changing their place of residence ough