From an Island Author:Anne Thackeray Ritchie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A COUNTRY SUNDAY. I am always well pleased with a country Sunday, and think if keeping holy the seventh day were only a human institution it would have been t... more »he best method that could be thought of for the polishing and civilising of mankind. . . . Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week, not only as it refreshes in their minds the notion of religion, but as it puts both the sexes upon appearing in their most agreeable forms, and exerting all such qualities as are apt to give them a figure in the eyes of the village.—Spectator. This does not seem less applicable now than it did in Addison's time, when perhaps men and women did not work so hard as they do now-a-days, or need the day of rest so greatly; when the village where Addison wrote was smaller than it is now; when Piccadilly was a single line of houses, looking out on fields at the back; when all the painful information, and the army of recollections and allusions which are expected from well-informed persons at every turn, were still in the future, and did not exist to trouble the lazy and haunt the ignorant; when the weeks did not come laden with letters to read and to answer, with "Times," with "Telegraphs," with "Saturday Reviews;" when there were a hundred thousand less books to cut, a hundred thousand less people coming and going, each in turn to be seen, visited, attended to, conciliated, solicited, as the case might be; when whole streets and districts round which we now laboriously ply in the dusty east wind were unbuilt and unthought of; when one single little welcome sheet, brought in with the tea-equipage by Betsy (who knew her mistress's tastes so well that when breakfast delayed it was because the "Spectator" had not yet come, but the water boiled, and she expected it every minute), was all that any...« less