healthy people of well-regulated and insensitive tastes. From Greenfield
Hill one looked away over a wide stretch of rolling country; low hills,
in long, desolate waves of pasturage and grain, relieved here and there
by a mass of black woodland, or a red farm-house and barns clustered
against a hill-side, just over a wooden spire in the shallow valley,
about which were gathered a few white houses, giving signs of life
thrice a day in tiny threads of smoke rising from their prim chimneys;
and over all, the pallid skies of New England, where the sun wheeled his
shorn beams from east to west as coldly as if no tropic seas mirrored
his more fervid glow thousands of miles away, and the chilly moon beamed
with irreproachable whiteness across the round gray hills and the
straggling pond, beloved of frogs and mud-turtles, that Greenfield held
in honor under the name of Squam Lake.

Perhaps it was the scenery, perhaps the air, possibly the cheapness of
the place as far as all the necessaries of life went, that tempted Judge
Hyde to pitch his tent there, in the house his fathers had built long
ago, instead of wearing his judicial honors publicly, in the city where
he attained them; but, whatever the motive might be, certain it is that
at the age of forty he married a delicate beauty from Baltimore, and
came to live on Greenfield Hill, in the great white house with a gambrel
roof and dormer windows, standing behind certain huge maples, where
Major Hyde and Parson Hyde and Deacon Hyde had all lived before him.

A brief Northern summer bloomed gayly enough for Adelaide Howard Hyde
when she made her bridal tour to her new home; and cold as she found the
aspect of that house, with its formal mahogany chairs, high-backed, and
carved in grim festoons and ovals of incessant repetition,--its
penitential couch of a sofa, where only the iron spine of a
Revolutionary heroine could have found rest,--its pinched, starved, and