be felt, and every
other stem and blade were motionless. There was an old story of one
having perished here in the winter of '86, and his body having been
found in the spring,--whence its common name of "Dead-Man's Hollow."
Higher up there were huge cliffs with chasms, and, it was thought,
concealed caves, where in old times they said that Tories lay hid,--some
hinted not without occasional aid and comfort from the Dudleys then
living in the mansion-house. Still higher and farther west lay the
accursed ledge,--shunned by all, unless 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-angle