paid more attention to the scenery we passed, than is my customary wont:
for I study nature rather in men than fields, and find no landscape
afford such variety to the eye, and such subject to the contemplation, as
the inequalities of the human heart.

But there were to be fearful circumstances hereafter to stamp forcibly
upon my remembrance some traces of the scenery which now courted and
arrested my view. The chief characteristics of the country were broad,
dreary plains, diversified at times by dark plantations of fir and larch;
the road was rough and stony, and here and there a melancholy rivulet,
swelled by the first rains of spring, crossed our path, and lost itself
in the rank weeds of some inhospitable marsh.

About six miles from Chester Park, to the left of the road, stood an old
house with a new face; the brown, time-honoured bricks which composed the
fabric, were strongly contrasted by large Venetian windows newly inserted
in frames of the most ostentatious white. A smart, green veranda,
scarcely finished, ran along the low portico, and formed the termination
to two thin rows of meagre and dwarfish sycamores, which did duty for an
avenue, and were bounded, on the roadside, by a spruce white gate, and a
sprucer lodge, so moderate in its dimensions, that it would scarcely have
boiled a turnip: if a rat had got into it, he might have run away with
it. The ground was dug in various places, as if for the purpose of
further improvements, and here and there a sickly little tree was
carefully hurdled round, and seemed pining its puny heart out at the
confinement.

In spite of all these well-judged and well-thriving graces of art, there
was such a comfortless and desolate appearance about the place, that it
quite froze one to look at it; to be sure, a damp marsh on one side, and