Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings-- The average man--"How many gardeners have you got?"-- Shielded by rose-leaves of culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice, complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp, winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff-dwelling--"The Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgiliance--A division in the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry-- Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly. That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality than any other with which we became conversant while in England. With the exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only experience vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time we lived in lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The boarding-houses of England are like other boarding-houses; the hotels, or inns, in the middle of the last century, were for the most part plain and homely compared with what we have latterly been used to; but the English lodging-house system had peculiarities. You enjoyed independence, but you paid for it with inconveniences. The owner of the house furnished you with nothing except the house, with its dingy beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything else necessary to existence you got for yourself. You made your own contracts with butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and lighting. Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill for the rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or of the pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you must do it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so dingy, the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes bed, always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the average man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the imagination of statisticians. And if the environment shows the man, one cannot help rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's forming the average man's acquaintance.