asses her summers.

It was a small clear lake almost emfoofomed in trees, across which an
embankment, formed for the purpose of a decoy for the wildfowl with
which it abounded, led into a wood which covered the opposite hill; an
old forest-like wood, where the noble oaks, whose boughs almost dipped
into the water, were surrounded by their sylvan accompaniments of birch,
and holly, and hawthorn, where the tall trees met over the straggling
paths, and waved across the grassy dells and turfy brakes with which it
was interspersed. One low-browed cottage stood in a little meadow--it
might almost be called a little orchard--just at the bottom of the
winding road that led to the Great Pond: the cottage of the widow King.

Independently of its beautiful situation, there was much that was at
once picturesque and comfortable about the cottage itself, with its
irregularity of outline, its gable ends and jut-ting-out chimneys,
its thatched roof and penthouse windows. A little yard, with a small
building which just held an old donkey-chaise and an old donkey, a still
older cow, and a few pens for geese and chickens, lay on one side of the
house; in front, a flower court, surrounded by a mossy paling; a larger
plot for vegetables behind; and, stretching down to the Great Pond on
the side opposite the yard, was the greenest of all possible meadows,
which, as I have before said, two noble walnut and mulberry-trees, and a
few aged pears and apples, clustered near the dwelling, almost converted
into that pleasantest appanage of country life, an orchard.

Notwithstanding, however, the exceeding neatness of the flower-court,
and the little garden filled with choice beds of strawberries, and
lavender, and old-fashioned flowers, stocks, carnations, roses, pinks;
and in spite of the cottage itself being not only almost covered with
climbing shrubs, woodbine, jessamine, clematis, and musk-roses, and in
one southern nook a magnificent tree-like fuchsia, but the old chimney
actually garlanded with delicate creepers, the maurandia, and the lotus
spermus, whose pink and purple bells, peeping out from between their
elegant foliage, and mingling with the bolder blossoms and darker
leaves of the passion-flower, give such a wreathy and airy grace to the
humblest building;* in spite of this luxuriance of natural beauty, and
of the evident care bestowed upon the cultivation of the beds, and the
training of the climbing plants, we yet felt, we hardly co