The anticipation of perpetual variety and change which is the lesson commonly taught to children by town life,—the Micawber-like expectation of “something turning up,” to amuse or distract them, and for which they are constantly in a waiting frame of mind, is precisely reversed for the little scion of the old country family. For him nothing is ever likely to turn up beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of fair weather and foul, the sickness of his pony, the death of his old dog or the arrival of his new gun. All that is to be made out of life he invents for himself in his sports and in his rambles, till the hour arrives when he is sent to school. And when the epochs of school and college are over, when he returns as heir or master, life lays all spread out before him in a long, straight, honorable road, all his duties and his pleasures lying by the wayside, ready for his acceptance. For the girl there is often even longer and more unbroken monotony, lasting (unless she marry) into early womanhood and beyond it. Nothing can exceed the _eventlessness_ of many a young lady’s life in such a home. Her walks to her village school, or to visit her cottage friends in their sicknesses and disasters; her rides and drives along the familiar roads which she has ridden and driven over five hundred times already; the arrival of a new book, or of some old friend (more often her parent’s contemporary than her own),—make up the sum of her excitements, or even expectations of excitement, perhaps, through all the years when youth is most eager for novelty, and the outer world seems an enchanted place. The effects on the character of this extreme regularity and monotony, this life at Low Pressure, vary, of course, in different individuals. Upon a dull mind without _motu proprio_ or spring of original ideas, it is, naturally, depressing enough; but it is far from equally injurious to those possessed of some force of character, provided they meet the affection and reasonable indulgence of liberty without which the heart and intellect can no more develop healthfully than a baby can thrive without milk, or a child’s limbs grow agile in swaddling clothes. The young mind slowly working out its problems for itself, unwarped by the influence (so enormous in youth) of thoughtless companions, and devouring the great books of the world, ferreted out of a miscellaneous library by its own eager appetite and self-guided taste, is perhaps ripening in a healthier way than the best taught town child, with endless “classes” and masters for every accomplishment under the sun. Even the imagination is better cultivated in loneliness, when the child, through its solitary rambles by wood and shore, spins its gossamer webs of fancy, and invents tales of heroism and wonder such as no melodrama or pantomime ever yet brought to the town child’s exhausted brain. Then the affections of the country child are concentrated on their few objects with a passionate