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 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.