happy in France not to be able to translate it—­not to have any word that answers to it.”  The large windows of the drawing-room I speak of looked away over the river to the blurred and blotted hills, where the rain was drizzling and drifting.  It was very quiet:  there was an air of leisure.  If one wanted to do something here, there was evidently plenty of time—­and indeed of every other appliance—­to do it.  The two ladies talked about “town:”  that is what people talk about in the country.  If I were disposed I might represent them as talking about it with a certain air of yearning.  At all events, I asked myself how it was possible that one should live in this charming place and trouble one’s head about what was going on in London in July.  Then we had excellent tea.

I have narrated this trifling incident because there seemed to be some connection between it and what I was going to say about the stranger’s sense of country life being the normal, natural, typical life of the English.  In America, however comfortably people may live in the country, there is always, relatively speaking, an air of picnicking about their establishments.  Their habitations, their arrangements, their appointments, are more or less provisional.  They dine at different hours from their city hours; they wear different clothing; they spend all their time out of doors.  The English, on the other hand, live according to the same system in Devonshire and in Mayfair—­with the difference, perhaps, that in Devonshire, where they have people “staying” with them, the system is rather more rigidly applied.  The picnicking, if picnicking there is to be, is done in town.  They keep their best things in the country—­their best books, their best furniture, their best pictures—­and their footing in London is as provisional as ours is at our “summer retreats.”  The English smile a good deal—­or rather would smile a good deal if they had more observation of it—­at the fashion in which we American burghers stow ourselves away for July and August in white wooden boarding-houses beside dusty, ill-made roads.  But it is fair to say that these improvised homes are not immeasurably more barbaric than the human entassement that takes place in London “apartments” during the months of May and June.  Whoever has had unhappy occasion to look for lodgings at this period, and to explore the mysteries of the little black houses in the West End which have a neatly-printed card suspended in the door-light, will admit that from the obligation to rough it our more luxurious kinsmen are not altogether exempt.  We rough it, certainly, more than they do, but we rough it in the country, where Nature herself is rough, and they rough it in the heart of the largest and most splendid of cities.  In England, in the country, Nature as well as civilization is smooth, and it seems perfectly consistent, even at midsummer, to dress for dinner; albeit that when so costumed you cannot conveniently lie on the grass.  But in