apt to have relation to a good estate in any neighborhood in which the wanderer happens to find himself.  For myself, I have never been in a country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity to be able to purchase the most considerable house it contained.  In New England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large mansion with Greek columns and a pediment of white-painted timber:  in Italy I should have made proposals for the yellow-walled villa with statues on the roof.  In England I have rarely gone so far as to fancy myself in treaty for the best house, but, short of this, I have never failed to feel that ideal comfort for the time would be to call one’s self owner of what is denominated here a “good” place.  Is it that English country life seems to possess such irresistible charms?  I have not always thought so:  I have sometimes suspected that it is dull; I have remembered that there is a whole literature devoted to exposing it (that of the English novel “of manners"), and that its recorded occupations and conversations occasionally strike one as lacking a certain desirable salt.  But, for all that, when, in the region to which I allude, my companion spoke of this and that place being likely sooner or later to come to the hammer, it seemed as if nothing could be more delightful than to see the hammer fall upon an offer made by one’s self.  And this in spite of the fact that the owners of the places in question would part with them because they could no longer afford to keep them up.  I found it interesting to learn, in so far as was possible, what sort of income was implied by the possession of country-seats such as are not in America a concomitant of even the largest fortunes; and if in these interrogations I sometimes heard of a very long rent-roll, on the other hand I was frequently surprised at the slenderness of the resources attributed to people living in the depths of an oak-studded park.  Then, certainly, English country life seemed to me the most advantageous thing in the world:  on these terms one would gladly put up with a little dulness.  When I reflected that there were thousands of people dwelling in brownstone houses in numbered streets in New York who were at as great a cost to make a reputable appearance in those harsh conditions as some of the occupants of the grassy estates of which I had a glimpse, the privileges of the latter class appeared delightfully cheap.

There was one place in particular of which I said to myself that if I had the money to buy it, I would simply walk up to the owner and pour the sum in sovereigns into his hat.  I saw this place, unfortunately, to small advantage:  I saw it in the rain.  But I am rather glad that fine weather did not meddle with the affair, for I think that in this case the irritation of envy would have been really too acute.  It was a rainy Sunday, and the rain was serious.  I had been in the house all day, for the weather can best be described by my saying that it had been deemed