Chapter 4 - Page 2

The shrubbery, of which the captain's English taste
had introduced quantities, was already in leaf, and even portions of
the forest began to veil their sombre mysteries with the delicate
foliage of an American spring.

The site of the ancient pond was a miracle of rustic beauty. Everything
like inequality or imperfection had disappeared, the whole presenting a
broad and picturesquely shaped basin, with outlines fashioned
principally by nature, an artist that rarely fails in effect. The flat
was divided into fields by low post-and-rail fences, the captain making
it a law to banish all unruly animals from his estate. The barns and
out-buildings were neatly made and judiciously placed, and the three or
four roads, or lanes, that led to them, crossed the low-land in such
graceful curves, as greatly to increase the beauty of the landscape.
Here and there a log cabin was visible, nearly buried in the forest,
with a few necessary and neat appliances around it; the homes of
labourers who had long dwelt in them, and who seemed content to pass
their lives in the same place. As most of these men had married and
become fathers, the whole colony, including children, notwithstanding
the captain's policy not to settle, had grown to considerably more than
a hundred souls, of whom three-and-twenty were able-bodied men. Among
the latter were the millers; but, their mills were buried in the ravine
where they had been first placed, quite out of sight from the picture
above, concealing all the unavoidable and ungainly-looking objects of a
saw-mill yard.

As a matter of course, the object of the greatest interest, as it was
the most conspicuous, was the Hutted Knoll, as the house was now
altogether called, and the objects it contained. Thither, then, we will
now direct our attention, and describe things as they appeared ten
years after they were first presented to the reader.

The same agricultural finish as prevailed on the flats pervaded every
object on the Knoll, though some labour had been expended to produce
it. Everything like a visible rock, the face of the cliff on the
northern end excepted, had disappeared, the stones having been blasted,
and either worked into walls for foundations, or walls for fence. The
entire base of the Knoll, always excepting the little precipice at the
rivulet, was encircled by one of the latter, erected under the
superintendence of Jamie Allen, who still remained at the Hut, a
bachelor, and as he said himself, a happy man. The southern-face of the
Knoll was converted into lawn, there being quite two acres intersected
with walks, and well garnished with shrubbery. What was unusual in
America, at that day, the captain, owing to his English education, had
avoided straight lines, and