XLII. city and country living.
The newspapers are circulating a curious statement by Mr. Grant Allen--who is understood to be a Canadian by birth and an Englishman by residence — to the effect that Americans do not like country life, and that those who are able to do so flee from the rural regions as if there were a pestilence there. This is a curious caricature of the real facts-almost as curious as when the same writer finds something melancholy in the dandelions and violets, the asters and golden-rod, along our roadsides, and condemns them all as “weeds.” he evidently has not tried, with Lowell, to “win the secret of a weed's plain heart,” and to him probably the gorse and heather of Scotland or the stately English foxglove would be “nothing but weeds.”The mistake he makes is in regarding this tendency to cities as in any way an American monopoly. It is, in truth, a feature of modern civilization. Owen Pike, in his remarkable work, “The history of Crime in England,” has shown that this very tendency has been in operation among our English
