One does not need to be a graybeard to recall the time when every county-town in New England had, because it needs must have, its first rate lawyer, its distinguished surgeon, its comprehensive business-man,—­and when a fixed and unchanging population gave to our villages a more solid and a more elegant air than they now possess.  The Connecticut river-villages, with a considerable increase in population, and a vast improvement in the general character of the dwellings, have nevertheless lost their most characterizing features,—­the large and dignified residences of their founders, and the presence of the once able and widely known men that were identified with their local importance and pride.  The railroads have concentrated the ability of all the professions in the cities, and carried thither the wealth of all the old families.  To them, and not to the county-town, repair the people for advice in all critical matters, for supplies in all important purchases, for all their rarest pleasures, and all their most prized and memorable opportunities.

Cities, and the immediate neighborhood of cities, are rapidly becoming the chosen residences of the enterprising, successful, and intelligent.  As might be supposed, the movement works both ways:  the locomotive facilities carry citizens into the country, as well as countrymen into the city.  But those who have once tasted the city are never wholly weaned from it, and every citizen who moves into a village-community sends two countrymen back to take his place.  He infects the country with civic tastes, and acts as a great conductor between the town and the country.  It is apparent, too, that the experience of ten years, during which some strong reaction upon the centripetal tendencies of the previous ten years drove many of the wealthy and the self-supposed lovers of quietude and space into the country, has dispersed several very natural prejudices, and returned the larger part of the truants to their original ways.  One of these prejudices was, that our ordinary Northern climate was as favorable to the outdoor habits of the leisurely class as the English climate; whereas, besides not having a leisurely class, and never being destined to have any, under our wise wealth-distributing customs, and not having any out-door habits, which grow up only on estates and on hereditary fortunes, experience has convinced most who have tried it that we have only six months when out-of-doors allows any comfort, health, or pleasure away from the city.  The roads are sloughs; side-walks are wanting; shelter is gone with the leaves; non-intercourse is proclaimed; companionship cannot be found; leisure is a drug; books grow stupid; the country is a stupendous bore.  Another prejudice was the anticipated economy of the country.  This has turned out to be, as might have been expected, an economy to those who fall in with its ways, which citizens are wholly inapt and unprepared to do.  It is very economical not to want city comforts and