In the country, you have generally the option of going on either of three or four roads. In London, you have the choice of as many thousand streets. In the country, you may ‘kill something’ whenever you take your walks abroad, if that special privilege of the British gentleman be dear to your soul, and you care to shoot, hunt, or fish. Or, if you belong to the softer sex or sort, you may amuse yourself in your garden or shrubbery, play tennis, teach in the village school, or pay a visit to some country neighbor who will bore you to extinction. In London, you have ten times as large a choice of occupations, and five hundred times as pleasant people to visit; seeing that in the country even clever men and women grow dull, and in town the most stupid get _frotté_ with other people’s ideas and humor. “Again,—and this is a most important consideration in favor of London,—when a man has no particular bodily pain or mental affliction, and is not in want of money, the worst evil which he has to dread is _ennui_. To be bored is the ‘one great grief of life’ to people who have no other grief. But can there be any question whether _ennui_ is better avoided in London or in the country? Even in the month of August, as somebody has remarked, ‘when London is “empty,” there are always more people in it than anywhere else’; and where there are people there must be the endless play of human interests and sympathies. Nay, for my part, I find a special gratification in the cordiality wherewith my acquaintances, left stranded like myself by chance in the dead season, hail me when we meet in Pall Mall like shipwrecked mariners on a rock; and in the respectful enthusiasm wherewith I am greeted in the half-deserted shops, where in July I made my modest purchases, unnoticed and unknown. In the country, on the contrary, _Ennui_ stalks abroad all the year round; and the puerile ceremonies wherewith the ignorant natives strive to conjure away the demon—the dismal tea and tennis parties, the deplorable archery meetings, and, above all, the really frightful antediluvian institution, called ‘Spending a Day’—only place us more helplessly at his mercy. We conjugate the reflective verb ‘to be Bored,’ in all moods and tenses; not in the light and airy way of townsfolk, when they trivially observe they were ‘bored at such a party last night,’ or decline to be ‘bored by going to hear such a preacher on Sunday morning,’ but sadly and in sober earnest, as men who recognize that boredom is a chronic disease from which they have no hope of permanent relief. There is, in short, the same difference between _ennui_ in the country and _ennui_ in town as between thirst in the midst of Sahara and thirst in one’s home, where one may ring the bell at any moment and call for soda water.” So speaks the modern Town Mouse, describing the more superficial and obvious advantages of his abode over those of his friend in the country. And (equally on the surface of things) straightway replies—