200 MY FARM. 



will remark your seediness, not unkindly, but with an 

 oblique eye-cast up and down your figure as a jockey 

 measures a stiff-limbed horse long out to pasture. 

 You may wear what toggery you will keeping by 

 the old tailors, and showing yourself lien gante, and 

 carefully read up to the latest dates ; still you shall 

 betray yourself in some old dinner-joke dead long 

 ago. And the friends will say kindly, after you are 

 gone, " How confoundedly seedy lius. has grown ! " 



Were this all, it were little. But the clash and 

 alarum of cities have stirred things to their marrow, 

 which you know only outsidedly. The great nervous 

 sensorium of a continent, with its wiry nerves raying 

 like a spider's web, in all directions, is packed with 

 subtle and various meanings, which you, living on an 

 outer strand of the web, can neither understand nor 

 interpret. Mere accidental contact will not estab- 

 lish affinity. In a dozen quarters a boy puts you 

 right ; and some girl tells you newnesses you never 

 suspected. The rust is on your sword ; thwack as hard 

 as you may, you cannot flesh it, as when it had every 

 day scouring into brightness. 



Dickering. 



OMETIME or other, if a man enter upon farm 

 life and it holds true in almost every kind of 

 life there will come to him a necessity for bargain- 



