THE COUNTRY HOME [CHAPTER 
rarely plucked. The lilac reaches to you its per- 
fume, and the cherry tree its fruit in the suburbs and 
main streets of Ithaca, N. Y., Cleveland, Ohio, and 
Louisville, Ky. Why not? This is vastly more 
human than cultivating your fine things behind 
board fences, or stone walls, or even hedges. 
Flower beds in the street are better than cows 
and swine. We shall probably see, by and by, 
all of our ugly, weed-bedraggled highways turned 
into a great, continuous public garden, reaching 
everywhere among the rich and the poor, and 
binding all homes together with bands of beauty 
and good-will. In one sense we are all one family, 
and while we should develop well-defined indi- 
viduality, we must remember what Emerson says, 
that we can “make society out of nothing but 
individuals’? — all other people constitute masses. 
In the country we must never get lost in indi- 
vidual tastes and turn our independence into 
idiosyncrasy. There is a social exclusiveness, but 
there is an equally offensive unsocial seclusiveness. 
The sense of remoteness from others is to many 
intolerable; to others it is the controlling sentiment. 
I have a neighbor who owns, but cannot occupy, 
seventy acres, and he is constantly bewailing his 
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