And now, at last, let us begin to seek out wherein lie the more hidden delights of the country life; the violets under the hedge which sweeten all the air, but remain half-unobserved even by those who would fain gather up the flowers. We return in thought to one of those old homes, bosomed in its ancestral trees and with the work-day world far enough away behind the park palings so that the sound of wheels is never heard save when some friend approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What is the key-note of the life led by the men and women who have grown from childhood to manhood and womanhood in such a place, and then drop slowly down the long years which will lead them surely at last to that bed in the green churchyard close by, where they shall “sleep with their fathers”? That “note” seems to me to be a peculiar sense—exceeding that of mere calmness—of _stability_, of a repose of which neither beginning nor end is in sight. Instead of a “changeful world,” this is to them a world where no change comes, or comes so slowly as to be imperceptible. Almost everything which the eye rests upon in such a home is already old, and will endure for years to come, probably long after its present occupants are under the sod. The house itself was built generations since, and its thick walls look as if they would defy the inroads of time. The rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the father’s marriage; another, tradition tells us, by a famous great-grandmother; the halls—no one remembers by whom or how long ago. The old trees bear on their boles the initials of many a name which has been inscribed long years also on the churchyard stones. The garden, with its luxuriant old-fashioned flowers and clipped box borders and quaint sun-dial, has been a garden so long that the rich soil bears blossoms with twice the perfume of other flowers; and, as we pace along the broad terraced walks in the twilight, the odors of the well-remembered bushes of lavender and jessamine and cistus (each growing where it has stood since we were born) fall on our senses like the familiar note of some dear old tune. The very sounds of the landrail in the grass, the herons shrieking among their nests, the rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle driven in to milking and lowing as they go, all in some way suggest the sense, not of restlessness and turmoil like the noises of the town, but of calm and repose and the unchanging order of an “abode of ancient Peace.”