224 WINTER SUNSHINE 



ber sky, and, as was the case with the English land- 

 scape, looked singularly desolate, — the desolation of 

 a dearth of human homes, industrial centres, fami- 

 lies, workers, and owners of the soil. Few roads, 

 scarce ever a vehicle, no barns, no groups of bright, 

 well-ordered buildings, indeed no farms and neigh- 

 borhoods and schoolhouses, but a wide spread of 

 rich, highly cultivated country, with here and there, 

 visible to close scrutiny, small gray stone houses with 

 thatched roofs, the abodes of poverty and wretched- 

 ness. A recent English writer says the first thing 

 that struck him in American landscape-painting was 

 the absence of man and the domestic animals from 

 the pictures, and the preponderance of rude, wild 

 nature; and his first view of this country seems to 

 have made the same impression. But it is certainly 

 true that the traveler through any of our older 

 States will see ten houses, rural habitations, to one 

 in England or Ireland, though, as a matter of course, 

 nature here looks much less domesticated, and much 

 less expressive of human occupancy and contact. 

 The Old World people have clung to the soil closer 

 and more lovingly than we do. The ground has 

 been more precious. They have had none to waste, 

 and have made the most of every inch of it. Wher- 

 ever they have touched they have taken root and 

 thriven as best they could. Then the American is 

 more cosmopolitan and less domestic. He is not 

 so local in his feelings and attachments. He does 

 not bestow himself upon the earth or upon his home 

 as his ancestors did. He feathers his nest very 



