The site of the ancient pond was a miracle of rustic beauty.  Everything like inequality or imperfection had disappeared, the whole presenting a broad and picturesquely shaped basin, with outlines fashioned principally by nature, an artist that rarely fails in effect.  The flat was divided into fields by low post-and-rail fences, the captain making it a law to banish all unruly animals from his estate.  The barns and out-buildings were neatly made and judiciously placed, and the three or four roads, or lanes, that led to them, crossed the low-land in such graceful curves, as greatly to increase the beauty of the landscape.  Here and there a log cabin was visible, nearly buried in the forest, with a few necessary and neat appliances around it; the homes of labourers who had long dwelt in them, and who seemed content to pass their lives in the same place.  As most of these men had married and become fathers, the whole colony, including children, notwithstanding the captain’s policy not to settle, had grown to considerably more than a hundred souls, of whom three-and-twenty were able-bodied men.  Among the latter were the millers; but, their mills were buried in the ravine where they had been first placed, quite out of sight from the picture above, concealing all the unavoidable and ungainly-looking objects of a saw-mill yard.

As a matter of course, the object of the greatest interest, as it was the most conspicuous, was the Hutted Knoll, as the house was now altogether called, and the objects it contained.  Thither, then, we will now direct our attention, and describe things as they appeared ten years after they were first presented to the reader.

The same agricultural finish as prevailed on the flats pervaded every object on the Knoll, though some labour had been expended to produce it.  Everything like a visible rock, the face of the cliff on the northern end excepted, had disappeared, the stones having been blasted, and either worked into walls for foundations, or walls for fence.  The entire base of the Knoll, always excepting the little precipice at the rivulet, was encircled by one of the latter, erected under the superintendence of Jamie Allen, who still remained at the Hut, a bachelor, and as he said himself, a happy man.  The southern-face of the Knoll was converted into lawn, there being quite two acres intersected with walks, and well garnished with shrubbery.  What was unusual in America, at that day, the captain, owing to his English education, had avoided straight lines, and formal paths; giving to the little spot the improvement on nature which is a consequence of embellishing her works without destroying them.  On each side of this lawn was an orchard, thrifty and young, and which were already beginning to show signs of putting forth their blossoms.