"Then you have heard of the Green Mountains yonder; they are like
thunder-clouds under the horizon?"

The children shaded their eyes, and looked searchingly at what seemed
to them a dark embankment of clouds, and then Mary turned, holding her
breath almost with awe, and gathered in with one long glance the broad
horizon, sweeping its circle of a hundred miles from right to left,
closed by the mountain spur on which they stood.

Where distance levelled small inequalities of surface, and made great
ones indistinct and cloudy, the whole aspect of the scenery took an
air of high cultivation and abundant richness. Thousands and thousands
of farms, cut up and colored with their ripened crops, lay before
them--golden rye stubbles; hills white with buckwheat and rich with
snowy blossoms; meadows, orchards, and groves of primeval timber, all
brightened those luxuriant valleys and plains that open upon the
Hudson. Deep into New York State, and far, far away among the
mountains of New England the eye ranged, charmed and satisfied with a
fullness of beauty.

Mary saw it, and all the deep feelings as fervent, but less understood
in the child than in the woman, swelled and grew rich in her bosom.
Not a tint of those luxuriously colored hills ever left her
memory--not a shadow upon the distant mountains ever died from her
brain. It is such memories, vivid as painting, and burnt upon the mind
like enamel, from childhood to maturity, that feed and invigorate the
soul of genius.

Enoch Sharp had been a man of enterprise. Action had ever followed
quick upon his thought. Placed by accident in certain avenues of life,