OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES 



houses, whose occupants made it a religious 

 duty to throw all their offal in the public 

 street and to cumber the same locality with 

 their hoop-poles, or their wood-piles, or their 

 shoe-parings. It is so hard to unlearn such a 

 noisome depravity of taste! Many of the 

 small towns on the banks of the Hudson (near 

 to New York) and in New Jersey, offer an 

 extended exhibition of this sort of local econ- 

 omy and fragrant treasures. And I have 

 sometimes thought that New York citizens, by 

 reason of the offal in their streets, become 

 quite agreeably wonted to such disposition of 

 cast-away bones and filth, and scent it, upon 

 their drives to their country homes, with an 

 appetizing relish. But in the name of all true 

 rural delight, I beg to enter protest, and to 

 urge every man who has his homestead under 

 green trees, to use what influence may lie in 

 him (albeit he is not select-man) to abate the 

 nuisance, and to make our village and country 

 road-sides smack of order and thrift and 

 cleanliness. Good example will do very 

 much in way of reform— more, in most in- 

 stances, than any zeal of impeachment. If you 

 approach an old-school neighbor, who has in- 

 herited the propensity to cumber the highway 

 before his door with all conceivable odds and 



102 



