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59 merry as a marriage-bell (of course, since it is the scheme of this writer!) The town women and the country women would be brought into close relationship with and knowledge of each other, and there would be a mutual stimulus to the production of whatever either needed most. Eventually a great part of the town population would stream into the country in the summer, and in winter the visit would be returned. Awkwardness and rusticity would disappear in one, in the other snobbishness and artificiality; and at last we should have introduced into our hard and dry American routine some of the healthful features and sweet influences of the life of the English country gentry,—last relic, as it almost is, of the old patriarchal system, which in many respects was so tranquil, so beneficent, and so beautiful. I should apologize to the farmer or the business man who may happen to read the above for its probable exaggeration of statement and of idea. Agriculture is not my sphere, and I have no time to study it. But as a housekeeper of moderate means, anxious for the comfort and happiness of her family, I cannot help wishing good food were cheaper; and as a woman I wish to wake up compassion for the many farmers' wives whom I believe to be now worked beyond their strength.

In the East, I should say, among those who, according to the ideal of Agur the prophet, have "neither poverty nor riches;" and perhaps the greatest proportion of this class, so far as New England and the Middle States are concerned, is to be found in towns of from ten to thirty thousand inhabitants. In these, people are not all on a level, as in country villages, so there would be fewer small jealousies to contend with; and yet they are not so distinctly divided into sets and circles as in the great cities; the various feminine social elements of such towns, therefore, would