If these be the advantages of Town life, however, there are to be set against them many and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country Mouse justly urges, half those quickly following sensations and ideas which constitute the highly-prized rapidity of London life are essentially disagreeable in themselves, and might be dispensed with to our much greater comfort. In the country, for example, out of fifty sights, forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful objects, even where there is no particularly fine scenery. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads, cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and over all, always, a broad expanse of the blessed sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days,—these are things on which everywhere (save in the Black Country, which is not the _country_ at all) the eye rests in peace and delight. In the town, out of the same number of glances of our tired eyeballs, we shall probably behold a score of huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses with a butcher’s shop as the most prominent object, an omnibus and a brewer’s dray, a score of bricklayers returning (slightly drunk) from dinner, and a handsome carriage with the unfortunate horses champing their gag-bits in agony from their tight bearing-reins while the coachman flicks them with his whip. In the country, again, out of fifty odors the great majority will be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean fields, or of newly ploughed ground, or burning weeds or turf. In the town, we shall endure the sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat, of carts laden with bones and offal, the insufferable effluvium of the city cook-shops; and last—not least—pervading every street and shop and park, puffed eternally in our faces, the vilest tobacco. And finally, in the country, our ears are no less soothed and flattered than our senses of smelling and sight. The golden silence when broken at all is disturbed only by the noise of running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating, thrushes and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks cawing on the return home at evening, or the exquisite “sough” of the night wind as it passes over the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the town, we have the relentless roar and rattle of a thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies, the unintelligible and ear-piercing cries of the costermongers in the streets, and generally, to complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte heard through the thin walls of our house, as if there were no partitions between us and the detestable children who thump through their scales and polkas for six hours out of the twenty-four. Such are the sufferings of the senses in London,—surely worth setting against the luxuries it is supposed to command, but which it only commands for the rich, whereas neither rich nor poor have any immunity from the ugly sights, ugly smells, and ugly noises wherewith it abounds.