To turn to lighter matters. Of course among the first recognized pleasures of the country is the constant intercourse with, or rather _bathing in_, Nature. We are up to the lips in the ocean of fresh air, grass, and trees. It is not one beautiful object or another which attracts us (as sometimes happens in town), but, without being interrupted by thinking of them individually, they influence us _en masse_. Dame Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us with her own lullaby. Probably, on the whole, country folks admire each separate view and scrap of landscape less than their visitors from the town, and criticise it as little as school-boys do their mother’s dress. But they love Nature as a whole, and her real influence appears in their genial characters, their healthy nervous systems, and their optimistic opinions. Nor is it by any means only inanimate nature wherewith they are concerned. Not to speak of their poorer neighbors (of whom they know much more, and with whom they usually live in far more kindly relations than townsfolk with theirs), they have incessant concern with brutes and birds. How much, to some of us, the leisurely watching of stately cattle, gentle sheep, and playful lambs, the riding and driving of generous, kindly-natured horses and the companionship of loving dogs, add to the sum of the day’s pleasures and tune the mind to its happiest key-note, it would be difficult to define. For my own part, I have never ceased to wonder how Christian divines have been able to picture Heaven and leave it wholly unpeopled by animals. Even for their own sakes (not to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated brutes), would they not have desired to give their humble companions some little corner in their boundless sky? A place with perpetual music going on and not a single animal to caress,—even those which Mahomet promised his followers,—his own camel, Balaam’s ass, and Tobit’s dog,—would, I think, be a very incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed!