ss it were now and then a daring youth, or a
wandering naturalist who ventured to its edge in the hope of securing
some infantile Crotalus durissus, who had not yet cut his poison teeth.

Long, long ago, in old Colonial times, the Honorable Thomas Dudley,
Esquire, a man of note and name and great resources, allied by descent to
the family of "Tom Dudley," as the early Governor is sometimes
irreverently called by our most venerable, but still youthful
antiquary,--and to the other public Dudleys, of course,--of all of whom
he made small account, as being himself an English gentleman, with little
taste for the splendors of provincial office, early in the last century,
Thomas Dudley had built this mansion. For several generations it had
been dwelt in by descendants of the same name, but soon after the
Revolution it passed by marriage into the hands of the Venners, by whom
it had ever since been held and tenanted.

As the doctor turned an angle in the road, all at once the stately old
house rose before him. It was a skilfully managed effect, as it well
might be, for it was no vulgar English architect who had planned the
mansion and arranged its position and approach. The old house rose
before the Doctor, crowning a terraced garden, flanked at the left by an
avenue of tall elms. The flower-beds were edged with box, which diffused
around it that dreamy balsamic odor, full of ante-natal reminiscences of
a lost Paradise, dimly fragrant as might be the bdellium of ancient
Havilah, the land compassed by the river Pison that went out of Eden.
The garden was somewhat neglected, but not in disgrace,--and in the time
of tulips and hyacinths, of roses, of "snowballs," of honeysuckles, of
lilacs, of syringas, it was rich with blossoms.

From the front-windows of the mansion the eye reached a far blue
mountain-summit,--no rounded heap, such as often shuts in a
village-landscape, but a sharp peak, clean-angled as Ascutney from the
Dartmouth green. A wide gap through miles of woods had opened this
distant view, and showed more, perhaps, than all the labors of the
architect and the landscape-gardener the large style of the early
Dudleys.

The great stone-chimney of the mansion-house was the centre from which
all the artificial features of the scene appeared to flow. The roofs,
the gables, the dormer-windows, the porches, the clustered offices in the
rear, all seemed to crowd about the great chimney. To this central
pillar the pat