Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

I dare say that this writer may not know, for she may not have been in France just at that time, how a good deal of what Ruskin suggests as possible became actual during the last French Empire. A friend of mine who was in Paris during that period was repeating to an accomplished Frenchman a delicate witticism. “Ha!” said his hearer, “that is admirable — that smacks of the provinces” (cela sent les provinces). My friend expressed surprise at the remark, having always supposed that, to a Parisian, all that was provincial seemed dull or vulgar; but his companion explained that so many of the more refined and cultivated families had confined themselves to their country residences in order to escape the carnival of vulgar wealth under Louis Napoleon, that it had become the habit to attribute any very fine touch of wit or manners to the country instead of, as formerly, to the city. In Ruskin's phrase, these things were considered “really quite rustic.”

My friend the teacher speaks for the West. In the secluded plantation life of the Southern States it is not at all uncommon to meet young people-young girls especially — who have never been twenty miles from home, and yet have sweet and gracious manners, manners that are as essentially rustic as an