(20.) What a painful habit and what a troublesome kind of obligation it must be for certain persons to be continually anxious of meeting one another, yet when they meet to have nothing but trifles to say to one another, and to communicate reciprocally things which were previously known to both and of no matter of importance to either; to enter a room merely to leave it again; to go out after dinner,[376] only to come home in the evening, highly satisfied with seeing in five hours three Swiss,[377] a woman they hardly knew, and another they scarcely liked. Whoever will rightly consider the value of time, and how irreparable its loss is, must lament bitterly such wretched trifling.[378] (21.) In town, people are brought up in complete ignorance of rural and country affairs; they can scarcely distinguish flax from hemp, wheat from rye, and neither of them from meslin; they are satisfied with eating, drinking, and dressing. Do not mention to a large number of townsfolk such words as fallowland, staddles, layers, or after-grass, if you wish to be understood, for they will not think it is their mother-tongue. Speak to some of them of measures, tariffs, taxes,[379] and to others of appeals, petitions, decrees, and injunctions; for they know the world, and above all, what is ugly and vulgar in it; but they do not know Nature, its beginning, growth, gifts, and bounteousness. Their ignorance often is voluntary, and based on the conceit they have of their own callings and talents. There is not a low pettifogger in his dark and grimy room, his brain teeming with the most wicked legal quibbles, who does not prefer himself to a husbandman, who, blest of Heaven, cultivates the land, sows when it is needed, and gathers a rich harvest; and if at any time the former hears mention made of the first men or the patriarchs, their rural lives and their husbandry, he wonders how people could have been living in those days without lawyers, commissioners, presidents, or solicitors, and cannot understand how they could ever have done without rolls-offices, courts of judicature, and refreshment-rooms.