The English, it seems, are not much of a removing people. When a Southron once settles himself down in a house, he only quits it with the greatest reluctance. No matter for an increasing family—no matter for bettered circumstances—no matter for the ambition of wife or daughters to get into a genteeler neighbourhood. An Englishman has naturally a strong feeling about his house: it is his castle, and he never will abandon the fort so long as he can possibly retain it. Give him but a few years’ associations to hallow the dwelling—let him have been married in it, and there spent the years of the youth of his children; and sooner than part from the dear little parlour where he has enjoyed so many delightful evening scenes, with his young spouse and his happy infants around him, he would almost part with life itself. An Englishman gets accommodated to all the inconveniences of his house, however great, as naturally as the fish with its shell, however tortuous. Some strange angularity in his vestibule, which nearly throws you down every time you visit him, may appear to you a most disagreeable crook in his lot, and one that ought to make the house intolerable to him; but, ten to one, he looks upon it as only an amiable eccentricity in the plan of the mansion, and, so far from taking ill with it, would feel like a fish out of water if it were otherwise. The Scotch, on the contrary, are an eminently migratory people. They never are three months in any house till they wish that the annual term were once more at hand, when they might remove to another. There is no day in the year so important in their eyes as Whitsunday, when almost the whole population of every considerable town is found to be on the move, exchanging houses with each other. This is a curious feature in the people, and seems as if it only could be accounted for by supposing that the nation is totally deficient in the phrenological organ called _inhabitiveness_. It is all to no use that experience is constantly showing how vain are their expectations of better lodging. Every disappointment seems to give them but a keener relish for a new attempt.