As I entered George,--the geographers I believe call the place Georgetown, but the familiar name is George,--by star light, just able to discern the tops of the mountains above it, I felt that it was a pretty place. On the following morning, as I walked up and down its so-called principal street, waiting between 5 and 6, for the wicked mules which were an hour late, I swore that it was the prettiest village on the face of the earth,--the prettiest village at any rate that I had ever seen. Since that I have moderated my enthusiasm so far that I will admit some half dozen others to the same rank. George will probably resent the description, caring more for its importance than its prettiness. George considers itself to be a town. It is exactly what in England we would describe to be a well-to-do village. Its so-called street consists of a well made broad road, with a green sward treble the width of the road on each side. And here there are rows of oak trees,--real English oak trees, planted by some most beneficent because patient inhabitant of the earlier days. A man who will plant a poplar, a willow, or even a blue-gum in a treeless country,--how good is he! But the man who will plant an oak will surely feel the greenness of its foliage and the pleasantness of its shade when he is lying down, down beneath the sod! In an English village there are gentlemen’s houses, and cottages, and shops. Shops are generally ugly, particularly shops in a row, and the prettiness of a village will depend mostly on the number of what may be called gentlemen’s houses, and on the grouping of them. Cottages may be lovely to look at;--sometimes are; but it is not often. 15_s._ a week and roses form a combination which I have seen, but of which I have read in poetry much more than I have seen. Perhaps the ugliest collection of ruined huts I ever visited was “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain.” But the pretty English villages will have a parson, a doctor, an officer’s widow, a retired linen-draper, and perhaps the Dowager Squiress, living in houses of different patterns, each standing in its own garden, but not so far from the road as to stand in its own ground. And there will be an inn, and the church of course, and probably a large brick house inhabited by some testy old gentleman who has heaps of money and never speaks to any body. There will be one shop, or at the most two, the buying and selling of the place being done in the market-town two miles off. In George the houses are all of this description. No two are alike. They are all away from the road. They have trees around them. And they are quaint in their designs, many of them having been built by Dutch proprietors and after Dutch patterns. And they have an air of old fashioned middle class comfort,--as though the inhabitants all ate hot roast mutton at one o’clock as a rule of their lives. As far as I could learn they all did.