The farm-smokes, sweetest sight on earth, Slow through the winter air a-shrinking, Seem kind o’ sad, and round the hearth Of empty places set me thinking. That, however, is not because Arcady is Arcady, but because life is life. Such as we have long ago found the secret of contentment, and something more. Shall I tell you what that secret is? Will you promise to take it as the rule of your own life if I do? Here it is, then, wrapped up in a very short and pithy aphorism--“The man who does not like the place he _has to live in_ is a fool.” Ponder it well, you people who are never tired of prescribing “a change” as absolutely necessary to endurable existence. Banished to the sweetest village in England, how dazed and forlorn you’d be! _We_ could accommodate ourselves to your life as easily as we could put on a new suit of clothes. _You_ could never accommodate yourselves to ours. You would mope and pine. Your only solace would be in droning forth a new version of the _Tristia_, which would not be half as melodious as Ovid’s. This poor Shepherd and his Lady Shepherd will never see the Alps again--never take a boat on Lugano’s lake in the summer evening, never see Rome or Florence, never again stand before the Sistine Madonna, hearing their hearts beat. Ravenna will remain for them unvisited, and Munich will be welcome to keep its acres of splashes, which Britain’s young men and maidens are told with some insistence are genuine works of Rubens, every one of them. These are joys of the past. But if you assume that two old fogies like us _must_ be longing for a change, fidgeting and hankering after it, and that we _must_ be getting rusty, dull, and morose for lack of it, that we are eating our hearts out with a querulous whimpering, instead of brimming over with thankfulness all day and every day--then you do us grievous wrong. What, sir! Do you take us for a couple of babies floundering in a tub, and puling for a cake of Pears’ Soap? Arcady or Athens is much the same to us. Where our home must be, there are our hearts. NOTE. THE AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENT OF INCOMES. This--the great financial measure of the future--can hardly be expected to commend itself to the philosophic economists of the present day. It is the penalty which every man who is before his time must expect to pay for his excessive sagacity, that his contemporaries neglect or deride him. Accordingly the very name of the French thinker who suggested this beautiful scheme for ensuring Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity has been forgotten and--will it be believed?--the number of those who have ever taken the trouble to work out his formula is quite disgracefully small. The _Formula_ of the great unknown stands thus:-- ·0001 (x - m)² = The amount which the state deals with in all incomes above £100 a year.[8] Here x = the income. m = £1,000. In working out this Formula, the _Rule_ may be stated as follows:--