Well, the country’s a pleasant place, sure enough, for people that’s country born,

And useful, no doubt, in a natural way, for growing our grass and our corn.

It was kindly meant of my cousin Giles, to write and invite me down,

Tho’ as yet all I’ve seen of a pastoral life only makes one more partial to town.

At first I thought I was really come down into all sorts of rural bliss,

For Porkington Place, with its cows and its pigs, and its poultry, looks not much amiss;

There’s something about a dairy farm, with its different kinds of live stock,

That puts one in mind of Paradise, and Adam and his innocent flock;

But somehow the good old Elysium fields have not been well handed down,

And as yet I have found no fields to prefer to dear Leicester Fields up in town.

To be sure it is pleasant to walk in the meads, and so I should like for miles,

If it wasn’t for clodpoles of carpenters that put up such crooked stiles;

For the bars jut out, and you must jut out, till you’re almost broken in two,

If you clamber you’re certain sure of a fall, and you stick if you try to creep through.

Of course, in the end, one learns how to climb without constant tumbles down,

But still as to walking so stylishly, it’s pleasanter done about town.

There’s a way, I know, to avoid the stiles, and that’s by a walk in a lane,

And I did find a very nice shady one, but I never dared go again;

For who should I meet but a rampaging bull, that wouldn’t be kept in the pound,

A trying to toss the whole world at once, by sticking his horns in the ground?

And that, by the bye, is another thing, that pulls rural pleasures down,

Ev’ry day in the country is cattle-day, and there’s only two up in town.

Then I’ve rose with the sun, to go brushing away at the first early pearly dew,

And to meet Aurory, or whatever’s her name, and I always got wetted through;

My shoes are like sops, and I caught a bad cold, and a nice draggle-tail to my gown,

That’s not the way that we bathe our feet, or wear our pearls, up in town!

As for picking flow’rs, I have tried at a hedge, sweet eglantine roses to snatch,

But, mercy on us! how nettles will sting, and how the long brambles do scratch;

Besides hitching my hat on a nasty thorn that tore all the bows from the crown,

One may walk long enough without hats branching off, or losing one’s bows about town.

But worse than that, in a long rural walk, suppose that it blows up for rain,

And all at once you discover yourself in a real St. Swithin’s Lane;

And while you’re running all ducked and drown’d, and pelted with sixpenny drops,

“Fine weather,” you hear the farmers say; “a nice growing show’r for the crops!”

But who’s to crop me another new hat, or grow me another new gown?

For you can’t take a shilling fare with a plough as you do with the hackneys in town.

Then my nevys too, they must drag me off to go with them gathering nuts,

And we always set out by the longest way and return by the shortest cuts.

Short cuts, indeed! But it’s nuts to them, to get a poor lustyish aunt

To scramble through gaps or jump over a ditch, when they’re morally certain she can’t —

For whenever I get in some awkward scrape, and it’s almost daily the case,

Tho’ they don’t laugh out, the mischievous brats, I see the hooray! in their face.

There’s the other day, for my sight is short, and I saw what was green beyond,

And thought it was all terry firmer and grass till I walked in the duckweed pond:

Or perhaps when I’ve pully-hauled up a bank they see me come launching down,

As none but a stout London female can do a............