ream of water in the region, whose pellucid current
reflects clear images of foliage and sky, and offers a favorite resort,
in shaded nooks, to the drifting canoes of lovers. In a clearing of the
woods farther northward along the shore, and at a good elevation, stands
Hyde Hall, facing the southeast across the bay. It is massively
constructed of large blocks of stone, and seems designed for a race of
giants. The main part of the house, completed in 1815, is two stories
high, in the colonial style, and over two hundred feet in length. In
1832 the facade was added, in the Empire style, with two splendid rooms
on either side of a large entrance hall. The doorways and windows, as
well as the chambers into which they open, are planned on a big scale.
Solidity of construction appears throughout the building, where even the
partition walls are of brick or stone. The masons, carpenters, and
mechanics who built Hyde Hall lived on the premises while the house was
under construction. They quarried and cut the stone from adjacent beds
of local limestone; they burnt the brick from clay found at the foot of
the hill; they cut the timber in the neighboring forest, and
manufactured all the windows, doors, and panel-work.

The house commands a superb view of the lake, and is surrounded by
beautiful old trees and forest land. Upwards of three thousand acres
belonging to Hyde Hall enclose it on all sides, and the residence is
approached by three private roads averaging over a mile in length.

Within the house, as one tries to visualize its spirit, from Trumbull's
portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which stands above the fireplace in
the great drawing-room, through rambling passages with glimpses of a
courtyard and alcoves and wings; up curved stairways to landings that
present unexpected steps down and steps up; along halls that beckon amid
dim lights to unrevealed recesses of space; down through kitchens where
huge pots and cauldrons reflect the glow of living coals, while shadowy
outlines of spits and cranes are lifted amid a smoke of savory odors;
deeper down into the spacious wine-cellars darkly festooned with
cobwebs, and chill as the family burying-vault where vines and snakes
squirm through the bars of its iron gates beneath the hill,--out of
these fleeting impressions rises the atmosphere of an old-world
tradition strangely created amid the original wilds of Otsego at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. It is a house that sh