But, beyond these mortifications of the flesh, London entails on its thoroughgoing votaries a heavier punishment. Sooner or later on every one who really works in London there comes a certain pain, half physical, half mental, which seems to have its bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm, and its mental place between our feelings and our intellect,—a sense, not of being tired and wanting rest, for that is the natural and wholesome alternative of all strong and sustained exercise of our faculties, but of being “like dumb driven cattle,” and of having neither power to go on nor to stop. We seem to be under some slave-master who whips us here and there, and forbids us to sit down and take breath. We want fresh air, but our walks through the crowded streets or parks only add fatigue to our eyes and weariness and excitement to our brains. We need food, but it does us little good; and sleep, but we waken up before half the night is past with our brains busy already with the anxieties of the morrow. We are conscious we are using up brains, eyesight, health, everything which makes life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled in such a mesh of engagements and duties that we cannot break loose. We can only break _down_; and that is what we pretty surely do when this state of things has lasted a little too long. Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, Why not try the golden mean, the compromise between town and country, to be found in some _rus in urbe_ in Fulham or Hampstead, or a villa a little way further, at Richmond or Norwood or Wimbledon? I beg leave humbly to contend that the venerable Aristotelian “Meson” is as great a mistake in geography as in ethics, and that it will be generally found that people adopting the Half-way House system of lodgement will be disposed to repeat the celebrated Scotch ode with slight variations. “Their heart is”—in London; “their heart is not,”—by any means, in Hampstead or Twickenham. Their days are spent either in waiting at railway stations to go in or out of town, or in the yet more tantalizing anticipation of friends who have promised to “give them a day,” and for whom they have provided the modern substitute for the fatted calf, but who, on the particular morning of their engagement, are sure to be swept off their consciences by an unexpected ticket for the opera, which they “could not enjoy if they had gone so far in the morning as dear Mr. A.’s delightful villa.” Of course, it is possible to live in the outer circle of real London, and have fresh air and comparative quiet, infinitely valuable. But he who goes further afield, the ambitious soul who dreams of cocks and hens, or even soars to a paddock and a cow, is destined to disillusion and despair. He tries to “make the best of both worlds,” and he gets the worst of both. The genuine Londoner considers his proffers of hospitality as an imposition; and the genuine country cousin is indignant, on accepting them, to find