cultivation. If some of our country friends, whose homes and habits differ from those herein described, are inclined to think our picture overdrawn of the striking difference exhibited in culture as to nature and art between denizens of the city and those of the country, we say with the poet, if you seek the monument, look around you. If you present happy exemption from the rule, thank heaven that you are not as other countrymen in that regard. But do not flatter yourselves that your happy condition represents the rule. Travel through the length and breadth of the land, as we have, taking in its average farm and country life, and you will find that what we have said is strictly true, that the country generally cares for neither nature

nor art.

1

Here, then, we have presented one of the standing anomalies of civilization, that a great number of persons are constrained to live in cities who love and are capable of appreciating the country, while a large proportion of those living in the country are destitute of the sense of the picturesque. We knew a young girl of 17 years of age, of perfect leisure; idle, one might say, except when in attendance on a fashionable school. Around her village home nature had lavished a profusion of gifts in grayblue rocks surmounted by foliage, brilliant in summer, and all the more in the glowing autumn, while beyond, at a turn, about a mile away, of the rock-parapeted road that led from the home in which she had been born and reared, broke the glorious sea with its everlasting roar. Yet she had never, as she mentioned, unconscious of its strangeness, been even as far as that inviting turn in the road, in plain view from the porch of her father's house. The peculiarity of the case does not lie in its isolation, for we have met multitudes of such cases, differing not at all in kind, but solely in degree.

Here is a contrast, indeed, between the city maiden, who would love to roam, if it were ever safe, on the outskirts of her

city, and the average country girl, who habitually shrinks from the exercise of walking, and cares not a straw for scenery. Could we transplant them it would certainly be well. We do, in a measure, transplant one, as the yearly exodus to the country shows. But here the city-bred meet a difficulty hard to understand in a rich and luxuriant land. In real country living the barbaric stage of fried cooking is, for the most part, found. One cannot live on view alone; the mind refuses to lend itself to the highest æsthetic enjoyment while the body grumbles for the lost flesh-pots of Egypt. An Irish servitor of ours, who accompanied us on one of our tours, put it neatly when he said one day to the hostess of our temporary lodging, " Ach, indade, ye may talk about your fresh country vigetables and milk and crame, but I find they come in the city much better to the gate!"

Where, too, is to be found the freshest air and brightest light, there they are the most rigidly excluded. Who does not know the stuffy, darkened rooms of the ordinary farm-house, the subtle smell in the chambers of the painted window-shades, and of the long-plucked feathers in the pudding bed; the sittingroom with its single ray of light, sparing the colors of the carpet, by which one navigates toward a book; and the one room devoted to refreshments, where alone are light and air, and flies hold high revelry? This is no fancy sketch of multitudes of farm-houses we have visited. We have ridden day after day amid mountains, with knapsack strapped behind the saddle and rifle resting athwart the pommel, dismounting to catch trout or to draw a bead upon some startled deer. At night-fall we have, with our companions, hobbled the horses to allow them to graze with restricted liberty, and then, becoming a cook for the nonce, have helped prepare viands in the style of Homer's heroes. Then we have retired to our blankets with a profound sense of comfort not experienced in many a farm-house. There was at

least fresh air. Oh, what a boon is fresh air! And the sunshine, perhaps, would greet us in the morning. What healing there is in these two ministers to life! This is a savagery, but it is the sweetest phase of savagery; savagery without its famines and its baleful passions; savagery with the sweetness of the earth around, under the pure canopy of heaven with its twinkling stars. It is the kind of savagery that only the highest civilization can thoroughly enjoy. Compared with the barbarousness or the semi-civilization of life which shuts out by the walls of a house what seeks entrance as some of the kindliest gifts of heaven, it is luxury. Digestion waits on appetite; the whole physical and mental being is exalted and in touch with something higher than ordinary life.

In cities the knowledge of hygienic living is far greater than in the country. Despite the unfavorable surroundings for health, which make the death-rate in cities much larger than in the country, the checks are greater there against disease and death. The city collects within its boundaries the ablest physicians of the land; even poverty proves no bar to receiving the best medical treatment; general sanitary knowledge among the educated is quite high; the municipality sees to the drainage and other salutary measures; it guards against ignorance, carelessness, or recklessness, by demanding for the public good that no one shall maintain an unhealthful nuisance; even neighbor is watchful over neighbor for his own and the public weal, that every noxious condition or practice that may lead to disease or pest shall be removed. Undoubtedly there is still room for much improvement, and great improvement is being constantly made through increase of general knowledge of sanitary laws. The city's chief fault, at the present time of its generally rapid growth in this country, is in not efficiently guarding against dumping of improper matter in the process of filling and grading at its extreme limits. Yet we cannot but admit, at the

same time, that with such a periphery as many a city has, moderately policed as all our cities are, the guardians of the law must needs be Argus-eyed and nearly ubiquitous, always to prevent the nuisance of improper dumping, especially as much of it is stealthily done after night-fall. When, therefore, we consider the intrinsic difficulties which a city encounters, from the nature of the case, in enforcing sanitary conditions, and the comparative ease with which they could be reached in the country, the difference in sanitary knowledge and practice as between city and country is amazing.

We think that we have shown, although briefly, without unduly entering into details, that in both city and country the ills which flesh is reputed to be heir to might be largely abated if people generally were more conversant with the laws of life, as to air, light, warmth, and exercise. There are, however, many other points as to these laws upon which we shall have occasion to touch when we come to detailed instruction in reference to them in the following pages. The moral of what has heretofore been remarked is that the law of life, which is fundamentally that of health, is that the tissues of the body, down to the ultimate cells of which they are composed, shall freely bathe in oxygen, and the organism reject the carbonic acid which represents its poisonous waste. Fresh, highly oxy. genated air, is not merely the breath of the nostrils; the nostrils are but the channels for conveying it to the tissues. The organism craves oxygen in every tissue, craves the actinic or chemical rays of the sun, and light and warmth. It demands in moderation exercise of function, because, however admirably parts were originally endowed, they cease, from neglect or disuse, to preserve their pristine integrity. And so complex and correlated is the mechanism of the system that one part cannot be deranged without injuriously affecting others in an ever-widening circle. Not less would we seek to impress upon

the reader the fact that through the influence of mind upon body health is concerned in the education and excitation of the spiritual part of being, through all influences, including nature and art, which raise the mind above the sordid cares of life. It is, in fine, through the deployment in moderation of all the faculties of mind and body that they receive the strength and equipoise which represent perfect being.