THE TOWN AND THE FIELD—WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE COCOONS OF PARASITES

Extract

Here I am again imprisoned within the walls of the town, after enjoying all the liberty of the field. How unphilosophical and dissatisfying to a devotee at the shrine of Nature are the labors that attach to a locality like this! One must turn over a new leaf occasionally. To balance the ledger, even though it have golden results, is comparably but as the dust of the balance. The City is stupid, hot, and odoriferous—empty, and yet full. Wealth, with its polished exterior, has long since departed, and “poverty, a wrinkle of itself,” remains. The intensity of the heat brings the hidden life without, and the town is seemingly the more full. What a wretched place in midsummer is a great City!