Thus much is seen, when I look directly eastward; but by an oblique glance southward (always from my library-window) the checkered farm-land is repeated in long perspective:  here and there is a farm-house with its clustered out-buildings; here and there a blotch of wood, or of orcharding; here and there a bright sheen of winter-grain; and the level ends only where a slight fringe of tree-tops, and the iron cordon of a railway that leaps over a marshy creek upon trestle-work, separate it from Long Island Sound.

To the north, under such oblique glance as can be caught, the farm-lands in smaller inclosures stretch half a mile to the skirts of a quiet village.  A few tall chimneys smoke there lazily, and below them you see as many quick and repeated puffs of white steam.  Two white spires and a tower are in bold relief against the precipitous basaltic cliff, at whose foot the village seems to nestle.  Yet the mountain is not wholly precipitous; for the columnar masses been fretted away by a thousand frosts, making a sloping debris below, and leaving above the iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the still older stain of lichens.  Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with dwarf cedars and oaks, which, as they file away on either flank, mingle with a heavier growth of hickories and chest-nuts.  A few stunted kalmias and hemlock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars, lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all which show under a sunset light richly and changefully as the breast of a dove.

But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining still.  Indeed, I do not know why I should have described at such length a mere landscape, (than which I know few fairer,) unless because of a rainy day it is always in my eye, and that now, having invited a few outsiders to such entertainment as may belong to my wet farm-days, I should present to them at once my oldest acquaintance,—­the view from my library-window.

But as yet it is only coarsely outlined.  We may some day return to it with a fond particularity; for let me warn the reader that I have that love of such scenes, nay, for the very verdure of the lawn, that I could put an ink-mark for every blade of the fresh-springing grass, and yet feel that the tale of its beauty, and of its emerald wealth, were not half told.

This day we spend in-doors, and busy ourselves with the whims, doctrines, and economics of a few

OLD-TIME FARMERS.

The shelves where they rest in vellum and in dust are only an arm’s-length from the window; so that I can relieve the stiff classicism of Flaxman’s rendering of the “Works and Days,” or the tedious iteration of Columella and Crescenzio, by a glance outside into the rain-cloud, under which lies always the checkered illustration of the farming of to-day, and beyond which the spires stand in sentinel.