If in this age of steam and electricity you would escape from the noise of the city, and experience for an hour the quiet joys of the English countryside, at a time when a chaise and four was the quickest means of reaching the metropolis from any part of the kingdom, turn to the pages of Jane Austen. In them have been preserved faithful pictures of the peaceful life of the south of England exactly as it existed a hundred and more years ago. The gently sloping downs crossed by hedgerows, the lazy rivers meandering through the valleys, the little villages half hidden in the orchards of apple, pear, peach, and plum, all suggest the land of happy homes. On the outskirts of every village there are the two of three gentlemen's houses: the substantial mansion of the squire, with its park of old elms, oaks, and beeches; a smaller house suitable for a gentleman of slender income, like Mr. Bennet, the father of the four girls of _Pride and Prejudice_, or for an elder son who will in time take possession of the hall, like Charles Musgrove in the story of _Persuasion_; and the still smaller parsonage standing in the garden of vegetables and flowers, surrounded by a laurel hedge, where lives a younger son or a friend of the family. The gentry that inhabit these homes carry on the plot of Jane Austen's novels. And what an even, almost uneventful life they lead. Life with them is one long holiday. Dance follows dance, varied only by a dinner at the mansion, a picnic party, private theatricals, a brief sojourn at Bath, a briefer one in London, or a ride to Lyme, seventeen miles away. But Cupid ever hovers near, and in each one of these groups of gentle folk we watch the course of true love, "which never did run smooth." For in spite of match-making mammas and stern fathers with an eye that the marriage settlements shall be sufficient to clothe sentiment with true British respectability, the six novels of Jane Austen contain as many true and tender love stories, differing from one another not so much in the incidents as in the characters of the lovers. Unlike the older novelists, who constantly drew the attention away from the main theme by stories of thrilling adventure, Jane Austen holds closely to the great problem of fiction, whether or not the youths and maidens will be happily married at the conclusion of the book.