People who live in cities and move regularly every year from one good, finished, right-side-up house to another will think I give a very small reason for a very broad fact; but they do not know what they are talking about. They have fallen into a way of looking upon a house only as an exaggerated trunk, into which they pack themselves annually with as much nonchalance as if it were only their preparation for a summer trip to the seashore. They don't strike root anywhere. They don't have to tear up anything. A man comes with cart and horses. There is a stir in the one house,--they are gone;--there is a stir in the other house,--they are settled,--and everything is wound up and set going to run another year. We do these things differently in the country. We don't build a house by way of experiment and live in it a few years, then tear it down and build another. We live in a house till it cracks, and then we plaster it over; then it totters, and we prop it up; then it rocks, and we rope it down; then it sprawls, and we clamp it; then it crumbles, and we have a new underpinning,--but keep living in it all the time. To know what moving really means, you must move from just such a rickety-rackety old farmhouse, where you have clung and grown like a fungus ever since there was anything to grow,--where your life and luggage have crept into all the crevices and corners, and every wall is festooned with associations thicker than the cobwebs, though the cobwebs are pretty thick,--where the furniture and the pictures and the knick-knacks are so become a part and parcel of the house, so grown with it and into it, that you do not know they are chiefly rubbish till you begin to move them and they fall to pieces, and don't know it then, but persist in packing them up and carrying them away for the sake of auld lang syne, till, set up again in your new abode, you suddenly find that their sacredness is gone, their dignity has degraded into dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the _débris_ of many generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how it is that I find a great crack in my life. On the farther side are prosperity, science, literature, philosophy, religion, society, all the refinements, and amenities, and benevolences, and purities of life,--in short, all the arts of peace, and civilization, and Christianity,--and on this side--moving. You will also understand why that one word comprises, to my thinking, all the discomforts short of absolute physical torture that can be condensed into the human lot. Condensed, did I say? If it were a condensed agony, I could endure it. One great, stunning, overpowering blow is undoubtedly terrible, but you rally all your fortitude to meet and resist it, and when it is over it is over and the recuperative forces go to work; but a trouble that worries and baffles and pricks and rasps you, that penetrates into all the ramifications of your life, that fills you with profound disgust, and fires you with irrepressible fury, and makes of you an Ishmaelite indeed, with your hand against every man and every man's hand against you,--ah! that is the _experimentum crucis_. Such is moving, in the country,--not an act, but a process,--not a volition, but a fermentation.