And, lastly, our typical country life must neither be that of people so great and wealthy as to be called frequently by political interests up to Parliament, and who possess two or more great estates (a man can no more have two _homes_ than he can have two heads), nor yet that of people in embarrassed and narrow circumstances. The genuine squire is never rich in the sense in which great merchants and manufacturers are rich; for, however many acres he may possess, it is tolerably certain that the claims on them will be quite in proportion to their extent. There is, in fact, a _kind of money_ which never comes out of land; a certain freedom in the disposal of large sums quite unknown among the landed gentry, at least in these days. But, if not possessed of a heavy balance at their bankers, the country family must have the wherewithal for the young men to shoot and hunt and fish, and for the girls to ride or amuse themselves with garden and pleasure-grounds according to taste. All these things, being elements of the typical English country life, must be assumed as at least attainable at will by our “Country Mouse” if he is not to be put altogether out of countenance by his brother of the town. As for the Town Mouse, he need not be rich, nor is it more than a trifling advantage to him (felt chiefly at the outset of his career) that his father or grandfather should have occupied the same social position as himself. All that is needed is that, in the case of a man, he should belong to a good club, and go out often to dinner; and, in the case of a lady, that she should have from one hundred to five hundred people on her visiting list. Either of these fortunate persons may, without let or hindrance, experience pretty nearly all the intellectual and moral advantages and disadvantages of living in a town, provided their place of abode be London. Over every other city in the empire there steals some breath of country air, if it be small; or, if it be large, its social character is so far modified by special commercial, industrial, or ecclesiastical conditions that its influence cannot be held to be merely that of a town _pur et simple_; nor are the people who come out of it properly typically towny, but rather commercial-towny, manufacturing-towny, or cathedral-towny, as the case may be. Turn we now from these preliminaries to the characteristics of the Town life and the Country life, each in its own most perfect English form. Let us see first what is to be said for each, and then strike our balance. Very briefly we may dismiss the commonly recognized external features of both, and pass as rapidly as possible to the more subtle ones, which have scarcely perhaps been noted as carefully as their importance as items in the sum of happiness will warrant. TOWN MOUSE _loquitur_.