City and country life compared--No aristocracy in Canada--Long winter evenings--Social evenings--The bashful swain--Popular literature of the day--A comfortable winter day at home--Young farmers who have inherited property--Difficulty of obtaining female help--Farmers trying town life--Universality of the love of country life--Bismarck--Theocritus--Cato--Hesiod--Homer--Changes in town values--A speculation in lard. Your city dweller turns away from a life in the country on account of society. Granted that we in the country cannot make calls and pay fashionable visits as easily as you can. But most good country families have a few genuine friends and acquaintances whom they visit periodically, and such visits are really appreciated by the persons entertaining. There is not much duplicity about our friendships, for we are not so much thrown together as city people; and when we do meet at the different family boards, genial right good fellowship is the rule. The cant and half-friendly reception of your city fashionables we know not of. There is no aristocracy in Canada, and all attempts to found any such class in America have signally failed. It is contrary to the genius and spirit of the democracy of America, for are we not quite as democratic as our neighbors to the south of us? Of all the prominent families who were on the boards at the time of the American Revolution, in the last century, only five are in existence this day. What a comment on the mutability of human affairs! Your titles and riches don’t stick in America, and there is many a boy in rural Ontario who now follows the plough who will yet rise to eminence as his years increase. To create and maintain a titled class in Canada, in the face and eyes of the great Republic adjoining us, would be an anomaly, and it never can be done. There seems to be a growing disposition to exclusiveness among the city families, and to discriminate to too great a nicety as to whom their sons and daughters shall marry. Their alliances in the matrimonial way are ever to be with those of the presumably rich, in contradistinction to others possessing push and merit, but not quite as many dollars in immediate view. So far as I can judge, I do not know of the son of a business man to-day in any of the country towns hereabout who inherits the wealth his father once possessed, and who pursues his father’s calling. John Adams, when ambassador of the United States to Paris, wrote home to his daughter who asked his views about her approaching marriage: “Marry an honest man and keep him honest.” In Adams’s advice there is no mention of the _dot_, as the continental Europeans use the term, and it is earnestly to be hoped that this word will never find any currency among us.