We have moved into the country to stay for a few weeks with some of our relations. They gave us such very warm and repeated invitations that we concluded to make some sacrifice to go, to oblige them, and I had no idea how much they appreciated our company until the end of the first week, when they handed me a bill for fifty dollars for board for three of us. Life in the country is very charming in summertime. We sleep in the spare room in the garret, where the temperature gets up to one hundred and four degrees. The roof has not been repaired since Columbus landed, and consequently it is full of apertures. For any one who wants to study astronomy while lying in bed, our garret offers phenomenal advantages; but whenever it rains at night there is nothing to be done but to make a raft out of the clothes horse and some bed slats, and float the family until daylight. It is sometimes an exciting apartment. A few nights ago, while hitting at a mosquito with a shuck pillow, I knocked a wasps’ nest off of one of the rafters, and in the morning we had knobs as big as hickory nuts all over our faces and legs. It is a good thing to live out here in the country, because the early-morning air is so healthful. We get our morning air very early. The family is routed out at four o’clock, so that the men may go to the harvest field, and if we lie abed, there will be nothing to eat until dinnertime. To be sure, that would not make any very great difference, if we could live without food, for country diet is not as attractive as I hoped it would be. We always have salt ham and fried potatoes for breakfast; then we have boiled ham and potatoes for dinner, and cold potatoes and sliced ham for supper. On Sundays we have two kinds of ham and stewed potatoes, and potato pudding for dessert. When I asked for milk for the children, they said they were using all the milk to fatten the calves. They apologized for not having butter because the hucksters who supplied it hadn’t come. I threw out a hint about raspberries, but they said the man at the store was expecting them every day from the city, and I would have to wait. They get their potatoes from the city, too, and the ham was cured in Cincinnati. The only vegetable that grows here is cabbage, but we are not allowed to eat it, because they trade it off at the store for potatoes, and they swap their chickens to the huckster for butter--that is, their young chickens. We had for dinner one day a hen that cackled during the War of 1812. She ate like a piece of india-rubber boot.