To be sure, there is the exception. When I add this qualification I have in mind the man who wearies not of spending his evenings from eight-thirty until eleven at a tired-business-man's show; of eating tired-business-man's lunch in a lobsteria on the Great White Way from eleven-thirty p. m. until closing time; of having his toes trodden upon by other tired business men at the afternoon-dancing parlor; of twice a day, or oftener, being packed in with countless fellow tired business men in the tired cars of the tired Subway--I have him in mind, also the woman who is his ordained mate. But, for the run of us, life in the city, within a flat, eventually gets upon our nerves; and life within the city, outside the flat, gets upon our nerves to an even greater extent. The main trouble about New York is not that it contains six million people, but that practically all of them are constantly engaged in going somewhere in such a hurry. Nearly always the place where they are going lies in the opposite direction from the place where you are going. There is where the rub comes, and sooner or later it rubs the nap off your disposition. The everlasting shooting of the human rapids, the everlasting portages about the living whirlpools, the everlasting bucking of the human cross currents--these are the things that, in due time, turn the thoughts of the sojourner to mental pictures of peaceful fields and burdened orchards, and kindfaced cows standing knee-deep in purling brooks, and bosky dells and sylvan glades. At any rate, so our thoughts turned. Then, too, a great many of our friends were moving to the country to live, or had already moved to the country to live. We spent week-ends at their houses; we went on house parties as their guests. We heard them babble of the excitement of raising things on the land. We thought they meant garden truck. How were we to know they also meant mortgages? At the time it did not impress us as a fact worthy of being regarded as significant that we should find a different set of servants on the premises almost every time we went to visit one of these families. What fascinated us was the presence of fresh vegetables upon the table--not the car-sick, shopworn, wilted vegetables of the city markets, but really fresh vegetables; the new-laid eggs--after eating the other kind so long we knew they were new-laid without being told; the flower beds outside and the great bouquets of flowers inside the house; the milk that had come from a cow and not from a milkman; the home-made butter; the rich cream--and all.