Winter has tragedies of its own, which may be worse;
but summer has nothing like it, nothing which imposes such a strain
on character and so severely tests early training. The worst of
it--the pity of it, we might say--is that this is not the expulsion
of the inferior by the superior race, which is going on in so many
parts of the world, and which Darwin is teaching us to look upon
with equanimity. The boarder is often, if not generally, the
cottager's superior in culture, in acquirements, and in variety of
social experience. He does not board because he likes the food, but
simply because it enables him to live in the midst of beautiful
scenery. He eats the farmer's poor fare contentedly, because he
finds it is sufficient to maintain his sense of natural beauty and
the clearness of all his moral perceptions unimpaired, and to brace
his nerves for the great battle with evil which he has been carrying
on in the city, and to which he means to return after a fortnight or
a month or six weeks, as the case may be.
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