st creaked. Low stone cottages lined the road-sides, with
windows that opened like doors, with an inevitable big black stove
whenever your eye got far enough in, with a pleasant stoop in front,
with women perpetually washing the floors and the windows, with
beautiful and brilliant flowers blooming profusely in every window, and
often trailing and climbing about its whole area. Here, I take it, is
the home of a real peasantry, a contented class, comfortable and
looking for no higher lot. These houses seem durable and ultimate. The
roofs of both houses and piazzas are broken, projected, picturesque,
and often ornamented. They shelter, they protect, they brood, they
embrace. There are little trellises and cornices and fanciful
adornments. The solid homeliness is fringed with elegance. The people
and the houses do not own each other, but they are married. There is
love between them, and pride, and a hearty understanding. I can think
of a country where you see little brown or red clapboarded houses that
are neither solid nor elegant, that are both slight and
awkward,--angular and shingly and dismal. The roofs are intended just
to cover the houses, and are scanty at that. The sides are straight,
the windows inexorable; and for flowers you have a hollyhock or two,
and perhaps an uncomfortably tall sunflower, sovereign for hens. There
is no home-look and no home-atmosphere. I love that country better
than I like this; but, if you kill me for it, this drive is
picturesque. These dumpy little smooth, white, flounced and flowered
cottages look like wicker-gates to a happy valley,--born, not built.
The cottages of the country, in my thoughts, yes, and in my heart, are
neither born nor built, but "put up,"--just for convenience, just to
lodge in while waiting for something better, or till the corn is grown.
Coming man, benefactor of our race, you who shall show us how to be
contented without being sluggish,--how to be restful, and yet
aspiring,--how to take the goods the gods provide us, without losing
out of manly hearts the sweet sense of providing,--how to plant happy
feet firmly on the present, and not miss from eager eyes the
inspiriting outlook of the future,--how to make a wife of today, and
not a mistress of tomorrow,--come quickly to a world that sorely needs
you, and bring a fresh evangel.

The current of our thoughts is broken in upon by a new and peculiar
institution. Every single child, and every group of