is very equally divided. There are few or
no very large landed properties, few or no
tenants, and the farmers own farms, and
hold lands of nearly the same dimensions
through many miles of farming sections.
Then—resulting from the facts that there
is plenty of room everywhere in America,
that there is not that narrow limit of
landed property and that dense population
of which one sees evidence in England,
and which one sees strictly regulated by
English law and custom—there is much
more latitude given to the lover of the
woods and fields. He is never warned off
by monitory boards, threatening prosecutions,
or dogs, or irascible bailiffs—expedients
necessary, perhaps, where thick
populations crowd closely around limited
domains.

You must imagine, then, a state of rustic
society where every man is absolute lord
of his hundred acres or so; where all are
equal in feeling and association, and very
nearly equal in material riches. You must
banish from your mind the impression of
lordly charities and patronages; you must
conjure up a race of well–to–do, hardy
and hard–working, independent, intelligent,
and, in their way, proud yeomen,
who think themselves fully "as good as
anybody," and yet who toil side by side
with their "hired help;" who sit at table
with their Irish, "hands," and who are
as keen at a bargain and as " cute" in
disposing of their harvest as any farmers in
the world. Every one of them has been
"raised," as they say, at the free common
school of his native village. If you will
go half a mile out on the main road, you
will not fail to see, playing lustily about
the little red school–house, the rising
generation of farmers, who will in time take
the place of the now middle–aged
husbandmen in the fields. So every man
has duly had his "eddication," which is,
to tell the truth, a far more substantial
one than his rather eccentric Yankee
dialect would lead you to infer. His newspaper
comes, as regularly as the big, old–
fashioned stage–coach, from the nearest
town; and in the evening, by the great
wood fire in that room which, in New
England farmhouses, serves at once as
kitchen, dining–room, sitting–room, and
sewing–room or, if it be summer, out in
the porch, with its canopy of cherry
branches he cons the sheet, his toilsome
day over, and reads every line of it, from
the date to the obscurest advertisement. He
delights to get you aside and hold a discussion
on politics or articles of religious faith;
he can hit you off the character and "record"
of the candidates for President, in minutest
detail; and can give you good, strong, undiluted
common sense, in his nasal twang,
on whatever subject you may discuss. If you
be a stranger, and especially if you have
travelled; his curiosity to know all about
"forren parts" is insatiable. "How did
you find them Polish women?" asked a
farmer of us once. "Putty fine women, I
guess: especially if you see 'em in
mountaneous kentry?" persuading himself that
he had satisfactorily answered his own
query. He is, hard worker though he be,
an earnest politician in a practical way; he
goes regularly to "teown meetin'; "hitches
his horse along the fence at the side of the
town–hall, gives a rough, swoop of his hand
over his thick hair, goes in, and in five
minutes is on his feet, making a thunderbolt
speech about mending Jones's dam, or
against paying the bonds in greenbacks.

Three of us, escaping from the choking
dust of the city, the heat and dull stagnation
of our offices, and the weary streets deserted
by that life of familiar faces, which alone
could make them cheerful, started off
suddenly, in a kind of desperation, for Farmer
Standish's. "Squire Standish's place" was
situated in one of the loveliest, snuggest
valley dips imaginable. Gently sloping
hills, furred with mosses and soft grasses,
seemed "narrowing to caress" the spot.
At the back of the house you came first on
an orchard, with rare wealth and variety
of fruit, bounded by a helter–skelter stone
wall: how often have we stretched out under
its half shade, and plunged the big dirk
blade of our Yankee "jack–knife" into the
biggest water melon of the good farmer's
patch! Behind the orchard was a cool deep
wood, crossed and counter–crossed with
glens, at the bottom of which were noisy
streams with fat trout hiding in dark rock
crevices and under thick moss bowers. In
the heart of the wood was an open space,
made a very grotto by the overhanging
beeches and chesnuts; and here, were rude
wooden tables and benches, with spots on
the ground worn black and bare by great
roasting fires. In front of the house,
ran what would be called in England a
considerable river, in America, a good sized
stream; perhaps as wide as the Thames at
Windsor; with a lumbering old wooden
bridge just a thought aside from the good
farmer's door, shaded by trees which "bent
down to kiss their shadows in the stream,"
as far as eye could reach on either side;