One is, that their guests like to be made at home, and treated
with confidence; and another is, that people are always interested in
the details of a way of life that is new to them. The Englishman comes
to America as weary of his old, easy, family-coach life as you can be of
yours; he wants to see something new under the sun,--something American;
and forthwith we all bestir ourselves to give him something as near as
we can fancy exactly like what he is already tired of. So city-people
come to the country, not to sit in the best parlor, and to see the
nearest imitation of city-life, but to lie on the hay-mow, to swing in
the barn, to form intimacy with the pigs, chickens, and ducks, and to
eat baked potatoes exactly on the critical moment when they are done,
from the oven of the cooking-stove,--and we remark, _en passant_, that
nobody has ever truly eaten a baked potato, unless he has seized it at
that precise and fortunate moment.
I fancy you now, my friends, whom I have in my eye. You are three happy
women together. You are all so well that you know not how it feels to be
sick. You are used to early rising, and would not lie in bed, if you
could. Long years of practice have made you familiar with the shortest,
neatest, most expeditious method of doing every household office, so
that really for the greater part of the time in your house there seems
to a looker-on to be nothing to do.
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