“Well, it’s all rot,” said the School-master, impatiently.  “Country life is ideal only in books.  Books do not tell of running for trains through blinding snowstorms; writers do not expatiate on the delights of waking on cold winter nights and finding your piano and parlor furniture afloat because of bursted pipes, with the plumber, like Sheridan at Winchester, twenty miles away.  They are dumb on the subject of the ecstasy one feels when pushing a twenty-pound lawn-mower up and down a weed patch at the end of a wearisome hot summer’s day.  They are silent—­”

“Don’t get excited, Mr. Pedagog, please,” interrupted the Idiot.  “I am not contemplating leaving you and Mrs. Smithers, but I do pine for a little garden of my own, where I could raise an occasional can of tomatoes.  I dream sometimes of getting milk fresh from the pump, instead of twenty-four hours after it has been drawn, as we do here.  In my musings it seems to me to be almost idyllic to have known a spring chicken in his infancy; to have watched a hind-quarter of lamb gambolling about its native heath before its muscles became adamant, and before chopped-up celery tops steeped in vinegar were poured upon it in the hope of hypnotizing boarders into the belief that spring lamb and mint-sauce lay before them.  What care I how hard it is to rise every morning before six in winter to thaw out the boiler, so long as the night coming finds me seated in the genial glow of the gas log!  What man is he that would complain of having to bale out his cellar every week, if, on the other hand, that cellar gains thereby a fertility that keeps its floor sheeny, soft, and green—­an interior tennis-court—­from spring to spring, causing the gladsome click of the lawn-mower to be heard within its walls all through the still watches of the winter day?  I tell you, sir, it is the life to lead, that of our rural brother.  I do not believe that in this whole vast city there is a cellar like that—­an in-door garden-patch, as it were.”

[Illustration:  “’A HIND-QUARTER OF LAMB GAMBOLLING
    ABOUT ITS NATIVE HEATH’”]

“No,” returned the Doctor; “and it is a good thing there isn’t.  There is enough sickness in the world without bringing any of your rus ideas in urbe.  I’ve lived in the country, sir, and I assure you it is not what it is written up to be.  Country life is misery, melancholy, and malaria.”

“You must have struck a profitable section, Doctor,” returned the Idiot, taking possession of three steaming buckwheat cakes to the dismay of Mr. Whitechoker, who was about to reach out for them himself.  “And I should have supposed that your good business sense would have restrained you from leaving.”

“Then the countryman is poor—­always poor,” continued the Doctor, ignoring the Idiot’s sarcastic comments.

“Ah! that accounts for it,” observed the Idiot.  “I see why you did not stay; for what shall it profit a man to save a patient if practice, like virtue, is to be its own reward?”