ublunary enjoyment; improvement is his
darling passion, and having thus improved his lands, the next care is to
provide a mansion worthy the residence of a landholder. A huge palace of
pine boards immediately springs up in the midst of the wilderness, large
enough for a parish church, and furnished with windows of all dimensions,
but so rickety and flimsy withal, that every blast gives it a fit of the
ague.

By the time the outside of this mighty air castle is completed, either the
funds or the zeal of our adventurer are exhausted, so that he barely
manages to half finish one room within, where the whole family burrow
together, while the rest of the house is devoted to the curing of
pumpkins, or storing of carrots and potatoes, and is decorated with
fanciful festoons of dried apples and peaches. The outside, remaining
unpainted, grows venerably black with time; the family wardrobe is laid
under contribution for old hats, petticoats, and breeches, to stuff into
the broken windows, while the four winds of heaven keep up a whistling and
howling about this aerial palace, and play as many unruly gambols as they
did of yore in the cave of old AEolius.

The humble log hut which whilom nestled this improving family snugly
within its narrow but comfortable walls, stands hard by, in ignominious
contrast, degraded into a cow-house or pig-sty; and the whole scene
reminds one forcibly of a fable, which I am surprised has never been
recorded, of an aspiring snail who abandoned his humble habitation, which
he had long filled with great respectability, to crawl into the empty
shell of a lobster, where he would no doubt have resided with great style
and splendor, the envy and the hate of all the painstaking snails in the
neighborhood, had he not perished with cold in one corner of his
stupendous mansion.

Being thus completely settled, and, to use his own words, "to rights," one
would imagine that he would begin to enjoy the comforts of his situation,
to read newspapers, talk politics, neglect his own business, and attend
to the affairs of the nation like a useful and patriotic citizen; but now
it is that his wayward disposition begins again to operate. He soon grows
tired of a spot where there is no longer any room for improvement--sells
his farm, air castle, petticoat windows and all, reloads his cart,
shoulders his axe, puts himself at the head of his family, and wanders
away in search of new lands--again to fell trees--again to cl