I could not forbear repeating though she had chid me for it before, how much I had been struck with several instances of her indifference to the work, and her superiority to its pleasures. "Do you know," continued she, smiling, "that you are more my enemy than the lady of whom I have been speaking? She only defamed my principles, but you are corrupting them. The world, I believe, is not so much a place as a nature. It is possible to be religious in a court, and worldly in a monastery. I find that the thoughts may be engaged too anxiously about so petty a concern as a little family arrangement; that the mind may be drawn off from better pursuits, and engrossed by things too trivial to name, as much as by objects more apparently wrong. The country is certainly favorable to religion, but it would be hard on the millions who are doomed to live in towns if it were exclusively favorable. Nor must we lay more stress on the accidental circumstance than it deserves. Nay, I almost doubt if it is not too pleasant to be quite safe. An enjoyment which assumes a sober shape may deceive us by making us believe we are practicing a duty when we are only gratifying a taste." "But do you not think," said I, "that there may be merit in the taste itself? May not a succession of acts, forming a habit, and that habit a good one, induce so sound a way of thinking that it may become difficult to distinguish the duty from the taste, and to separate the principle from the choice? This I really believe to be the case in minds finely wrought and vigilantly watched." I observed that however delightful the country might be a great part of the year, yet there were a few winter months when I feared it might be dull, though not in the degree Sir John's Richmond lady found it. With a smile of compassion at my want of taste, she said, "she perceived I was no gardener. To me," added she, "the winter has charms of its own. If I were not afraid of the light habit of introducing Providence on an occasion not sufficiently important, I would say that he seems to reward those who love the country well enough to live in it the whole year, by making the greater part of the winter the busy season for gardening operations. If I happen to be in town a few days only, every sun that shines, every shower that falls, every breeze that blows, seems wasted, because I do not see their effects upon my plants." "But surely," said I, "the winter at least suspends your enjoyment. There is little pleasure in contemplating vegetation in its torpid state, in surveying The naked shoots, barren as lances, as Cowper describes the winter-shrubbery."