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 formal paths; giving to the little spot the