MY FARM OF EDGEWOOD 



tance from the city, as one not to be exceeded. 

 Three hours in our time means eighty miles; 

 beyond that distance from a great city, one 

 may be out of the eddies of its influence; 

 within it, if upon the line of some important 

 railway, he is fairly in a suburb. Three hours 

 to come, and three to go, if the necessity 

 arise, leave four hours of the pith of the day, 

 and of its best sunshine, for the usurers of the 

 town. Double four hours of distance, and you 

 have a journey that is exhausting and fatigu- 

 ing; double two hours, or less, and you have 

 an ease of transit that leads into temptation. 

 If a man then honestly determines to be a 

 country liver^ I hardly know a happier mean of 

 distance than three hours from the city. If, 

 indeed, he enters upon that ambiguous mode 

 of life which is neither city nor country, which 

 knows of gardens only in the night time, and 

 takes all its sunshine from the pavements, 

 which flits between the two without tasting 

 the full zest of either — of course, for this mode 

 of life, three hours is too great a distance. 

 The man who is content to live in grooves on 

 which he is shot back and forth year after year 

 — the merest shuttle of a commuter— will 

 naturally be anxious to make the grooves short, 

 and the commutation small. 



lO 



