And then its inn! its single, unpretending inn, with its simple flag-staff, its modest piazza, and its cool, clean parlor, with the vase of asparagus upon the freshly reddened hearth-stone! Its sleeping-rooms with their snow-white curtains and coverlets, and the rustling foliage against their windows—what a temptation it was to enter them of a warm summer afternoon! Now, forsooth, the respectable old tenement is replaced by a hotel. I beg pardon—a _house_, built after the style of the Parthenon, its sides painted very white, and its blinds very green. The bar-room is floored with tesselated squares of marble, and there is a white marble counter, behind which presides a spruce young man with long dark hair plastered over his right ear, and an emerald breast-pin on his shirt bosom. Nay, it is rumored that the landlord has serious designs of introducing a gong in the place of the good old-fashioned bell of our forefathers. What is the country coming to? Within my remembrance, the people of Tattletown were the best natured, most industrious and contented people alive. Every evening in summer their patriarchs might be seen sitting in front of their woodbine-covered porches, smoking their pipes and talking over old times, while groups of ruddy, riotous children, flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, danced to the strains of some village Paganini. Poor, deluded, miserable Tattletonians! What a sight was it for the philanthropist to grieve at! Little knew they, of the errors and vices of the social system! They had not read Miss Martineau’s tracts; knew nothing of Owenism, nothing of Grahamism, nothing of transcendentalism, nothing of Fourierism, nothing of Mormonism. The “Society for the promotion of every thing,” had not established a branch among them. They were benighted, uninitiated; contented to live as their fathers had lived before them; to pluck the rose and leave the thorn behind; to keep their linen and their consciences clean, and to remain at peace with all mankind. Then the belles of the village—how beautiful they were! how artless! how adorned with every sylvan grace! Now they all seem to have lost the heritage of loveliness. They look didactic, sedentary and precocious. There is not the same bloom on the cheek—the same sparkle in the eye—the same ruby mischief on the lip. Instead of cultivating their music and their flower-gardens, working flags for the Tattletown “Guardians of Liberty,” and teaching the children their catechisms on Sundays, they are meddling with matters that they have not the means of comprehending, establishing _anti-everything_ societies, and fussing over phrenology and other newfangled heresies. Instead of a vase of freshly gathered flowers upon their shelves, you are now greeted by a vile plaster bust, with the skull phrenologically mapped out, and figured. I never encounter one of the odious things, without putting my fist in its face.