Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/349

Rh spend their winters every year in country houses, limited, practically, to the society of a Mr., or a Mrs., Wrangle, who makes life a burden by everlasting fault-finding, squabbling, worry, suspicion, jar and jolt. As regards children or dependent people, or the wives of despotic husbands, the case is often worse than this. By a terrible law of our nature, an unkindness, harshness, or injustice done once to any one, has a frightful tendency to produce hatred of the victim — (I have elsewhere called the passion heteropathy) — and a restlessness to heap wrong on wrong, and accusation on accusation, to justify the first fault. Woe to the hapless step-child, or orphan nephew, or penniless cousin, or helpless and aged mother-in-law, who falls under this terrible destiny in a country house, where there are few eyes to witness the cruelty, and no tongue bold enough to denounce it! The misery endured by such beings, the poor young souls which wither under the blight of the perpetual unmerited blame, and the older sufferers mortified and humiliated in their age, must be quite indescribable. Perhaps by no human act can truer charity be done than by resolutely affording moral support, if we can do no more, to such butts and victims; and, if it be possible, to take them altogether away out of their ill-omened conditions, and "deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the adversary." It is astonishing how much may be done by very humble spectators to put a check to evils like these, even by merely showing their own surprise and distress in witnessing them; and, on the contrary, how deplorably ready are nine people out of ten to fall in with the established prejudices and unkindnesses of every house they enter.

Very little of this kind of thing goes on in towns. People are too busy about their own affairs and pleasures, and their feelings of all kinds are too much diffused among the innumerable men and women with whom they come in contact, to permit of concentrated dislike settling down on any inmate of their homes in the thick cloud it is apt to do in the country.

Here we touch, indeed, on one great secret of the difference of town and country life. All sentiments, amiable and unamiable, are more or less dissipated in town, and concentrated and deepened in the country. Even a very trifling annoyance, an arrangement of hours of meals too late or too early for our health, a smoky chimney, a bad coachman, a door below stairs perpetually banged, assumes a degree of importance when multiplied by the infinite number of times we expect to endure it in the limitless monotony of country life. Our nerves become in advance irritated by all we expect to go through in the future, and the consequence is that a degree of heat enters into family disputes about such matters which greatly amazes the parties concerned to remember, when the wear and tear of travel and of town life have made the whole mode of existence in a country home seem a placid stream, with scarcely a pebble to stir a ripple.

And now, at last, let us begin to seek out wherein lie the more hidden delights of the country life; the violets under the hedge which sweeten all the air, but remain half-unobserved even by those who would fain gather up the flowers. We return in thought to one of those old homes, bosomed in its ancestral trees, and with the work-day world far enough away behind the park palings so that the sound of wheels is never heard, save when some friend approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What is the keynote of the life led by the men and women who have grown from childhood to manhood and womanhood in such a place, and then drop slowly down the long years which will lead them surely at last to that bed in the green churchyard close by, where they shall "sleep with their fathers"? That "note" seems to me to be a peculiar sense, exceeding that of mere calmness — of stability, of a repose of which neither beginning nor end are in sight. Instead of a "changeful world," this is to them a world where no change comes, or comes so slowly as to be imperceptible. Almost everything which the eye rests upon in such a home is already old, and will endure for years to come, probably long after its present occupants are under the sod. The house itself was built generations since, and its thick walls look as if they would defy the inroads of time. The rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the father's marriage; another, tradition tells, by a famous great-grandmother; the halls — no one remembers by whom or how long ago. The old trees bear on their boles the initials of many a name which has been inscribed long years also on the churchyard stones. The garden, with its luxuriant old-fashioned flowers, and clipped box borders, and quaint sun-dial, has been a garden so long that the rich soil bears blossoms with