under a roof, though a very humble one, which I could really
call my own. Nor did I fail (as is the custom of landed
proprietors all about the world) to parade the poor fellow up
and down over my half a dozen acres; secretly rejoicing,
nevertheless, that the disarray of the inclement season, and
particularly the six inches of snow then upon the ground,
prevented him from observing the ragged neglect of soil and
shrubbery into which the place had lapsed. It was idle,
however, to imagine that an airy guest from Monument Mountain,
Bald Summit, and old Graylock, shaggy with primeval forests,
could see anything to admire in my poor little hillside, with
its growth of frail and insect-eaten locust trees. Eustace very
frankly called the view from my hill top tame; and so, no
doubt, it was, after rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire,
and especially the northern parts of the county, with which his
college residence had made him familiar. But to me there is a
peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle
eminences. They are better than mountains, because they do not
stamp and stereotype themselves into the brain, and thus grow
wearisome with the same strong impression, repeated day after
day. A few summer weeks among mountains, a lifetime among green
meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever new, because
continually fading out of the memory--such would be my sober
choice.

I doubt whether Eustace did not internally pronounce the whole
thing a bore, until I led him to my predecessor's little
ruined, rustic summer house, midway on the hillside. It is a
mere skeleton of slender, decaying tree trunks, with neither
walls nor a roof; nothing but a tracery of branches and twigs,