very tree-top on the indented ridges stood out like a little
pinnacle, till with a long, downward curve, both gracious and grandiose,
the mountainside fell to the edge of a gem-like, broken-shored lake. It
was a world extraordinarily green and clean. Its cleanness was even more
amazing than its greenness. The unsullied freshness of a new creation
seemed to lie on it all day long. It was a world which suggested no past
and boded no future. Its transparent air, in which there was not a shred
of atmosphere, its high lights, and long shadows, and restful,
clambering woods, and singing birds, and sweet, strong winds were like
those of some perpetual, paradisical present, with no story to tell, and
none that would ever be enacted. It was a world in which Nature seemed
to hold herself aloof from man, refusing to be tamed by him, rejecting
his caress, keeping herself serene, inviolate, making his presence
incongruous with her sanctity.

It was this incongruity that struck Chip first of all. Not that there
were any of the unapproachable grandeurs of the Alps or the Selkirks,
nor anything that towered or terrified or overawed. All the hilly
woodland was smiling and friendly--but remote. Man might buy a piece of
ground and camp on it; but if he had sensibilities he would remain
conscious of an essence that eluded him, the real thing--withdrawn. He
could be on the spot, but he could never be of it--not any more than he
could give his dwelling the air of springing from the soil.

Chip noticed that, too--the intrusive aspect of any kind of roof that
man could make to cover him, unless it were a wigwam. Emery Bland had
tried to temper this resentment of the landscape to what was not
indigenous to itself by making the lines of his shelter as simple and as
straight as possible. He was from the first apologetic to the Spirit of
the Mountain, as who would say, "Hang it all, you've tempted me here,
but I'll outrage you as little as I can." So he perched his long, white
house, Italian in style if it had style at all, on the top of a knoll
whence he could look far into green depths, with nothing in the way of
excrescence but a tile-paved open-air dining-room at one end, and a
shady spot of similar construction at the other, getting his effects
from proportion. Something in the way of lawn and garden he was obliged
to have, and Mrs. Bland had insisted on a pergola. He fought the pergola
for a year or two, but Mrs. Bland had had her way. A cou