The 'offices'-- such it is the fashion to call the places in which work was formerly done--are carefully kept in the background.

The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly eradicated, to make way for a blazing parterre after the manner of the suburban villa--gay in the summer, in the spring a wilderness of clay, in the autumn a howling desert of musty evergreens..
The 'civilisation' of the town has, in fact, gone out and taken root afresh in the country.

There is no reason why the farmer should not be educated; there is no reason why his wife should not wear a sealskin jacket, or the daughter interpret Beethoven.

But the question arises, Has not some of the old stubborn spirit of earnest work and careful prudence gone with the advent of the piano and the oil painting?
While wearing the dress of a lady, the wife cannot tuck up her sleeves and see to the butter, or even feed the poultry, which are down at the pen across 'a nasty dirty field.' It is easy to say that farming is gone to the dogs, that corn is low, and stock uncertain, and rents high, and so forth.

All that is true, but difficulties are nothing new; nor must too much be expected from the land.
A moderate-sized farm, of from 200 to 800 acres, will no more enable the mistress and the misses to play the fine lady to-day than it would two generations ago.