“Oh, I hope not--that is, if you don’t want to be. Oh, it must be such a dreary life! The very thought of it sets my teeth on edge. The dreadful people you have to know: men without an idea beyond crops and calves and the cheese-factory; women slaving their lives out doing bad cooking, mending for a houseful of men, devoting their scarce opportunities for intercourse with other women to the weakest and most wretched gossip; coarse servants who eat at the table with their employers and call them by their Christian names; boys whose only theory about education is thrashing the school teacher, if it is a man, or breaking her heart by their mean insolence if it is a woman; and girls brought up to be awkward gawks, without a chance in life, since the brighter and nicer they are the more they will suffer from marriage with men mentally beneath them--that is, if they don’t become sour old maids. I don’t wonder you hate it all, Seth.” “You talk like a book,” said Seth, in tones of unmistakable admiration. “I didn’t suppose any woman could talk like that.” “I talk as I feel always, when I come into contact with country life, and I get, angry with people who maunder about its romantic and picturesque side. Where is it, I should, like to know?” “Oh, it isn’t all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course----“--here he hesitated a little--“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kin all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course----” here he hesitated a little--“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kind o’ run down.” “No, Seth, it isn’t that; the trail of the serpent is over it all--rich and poor, big and little. The Nineteenth century is a century of cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age--and the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul, but this isn’t the century.” “But Webster was a farm boy, and so was Lincoln and Garfield and Jackson--almost all our great men. Hardly any of them are born in cities, you will find.” “Oh, the country is just splendid to be born in, no doubt of that; but after you are born, get out of it as soon as you can.” “I don’t know as I can leave Father very well,” said Seth slowly, and as if in deep thought.