One of the finest things about living in the country is that you can wander off to some shady spot and lie in luxurious ease upon the grass, dreaming away the hours. And while you are dreaming away the hours, straddle bugs will probably crawl up your pantaloons and bite you, and caterpillars will insert themselves between your shirt collar and neck. When you get home you find that you have caught a frightful cold from lying on the damp grass, and while you are sneezing, you learn that one of the children has fallen out of the haymow and run a pitchfork through his calf, and that the other one has been pitched over the fence by the Durham bull. Then, we like to sit out in the cool of the evening and enjoy the calm, quiet solitude of the place. There is a canal at the end of the lawn, and when we get enough of the quiet solitude, the _Mary Jane, of Pencader_, will come along, and we will be entertained by the captain, who swears violently at the boy because he does not stimulate the mules to sufficient activity. As he wakes the echoes with his abnormal profanity, we suddenly put the children to bed to protect them from demoralization; and then, when the hind mule has kicked at the boy three or four times, the boat passes upstream, and silence once more returns. We sit there until bedtime, beating off the mosquitoes with one hand and scratching the bites with the other. And as soon as we get into our garret with a candle the atmosphere is filled with bugs, which dance around the room and beat against the walls until we go to sleep. It is a good thing to live in the country, because the children have such a chance to obtain vigorous health. They begin the summer in the country with prickly heat. Before that is cured they get cholera morbus from eating green apples. Afterward they catch mumps from the children on the next farm, and at intermediate periods they get bitten by the dog, they come near drowning in the creek, they are sunstruck, they rub against poison vine in the woods and swell up, they are tangled in the mower and lose fingers in the feed cutter, they are run over by the ox cart and ground up in the threshing machine. Then they cry all night in our garret, and eat so much at meals that the owner of the house looks sour at them and growls out something about raising the price of board; and they wear out clothes enough to run an orphan asylum for a couple of years. One of the best things about the country is that it gives you a chance to go a-fishing. We fish in the creek. After digging for a couple of hours in search of worms, we go to the water and throw in. I get a bite and pull up, and the line winds tightly around the limb of a tree. Then I shin up the tree and undo it, and throw in again. After several more ineffectual bites, I pull up an eel, and find that he has swallowed the hook.