MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE 



farm, garden, or country seat, and enable the 

 purchaser to take a complete trade view of his 

 proposed enterprise. 



To return to Mr. Urban— his negotiations 

 must be largely through the established real- 

 estate offices, or by personal reply to the news- 

 paper advertisements. These leave him in a 

 dreary muddle. Those who have had expe- 

 rience, know why, and how. The established 

 agencies take no account of an applicant's 

 tastes, or positive wants, (if he were able 

 intelligibly to express them), and are only 

 anxious to make sale; the advertisements are 

 naturally exaggerated to a degree that makes 

 the consequent search a ludicrous bore. One 

 "charming place" is next to a great reach of 

 marsh land, where every informant is pale and 

 quaking with the ague; another is so beset 

 with rocks that it would require double the 

 cost of purchase to clear a smooth bit of green- 

 sward at the door. 



Such incongruities naturally shock a man of 

 commercial susceptibilities — if he proposes to 

 carry them to the country with him. Mr. 

 Urban does; and, fretted by an accumulation 

 of mischances, and of misdirections, as well 

 as by not a little conscious ignorance of his 

 own, appeals to me for certain practical hints 



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