closely congregated, a million of the largest and most resplendent tulips!  Only thus can the reader get any idea of the picture I would convey.  And then the stately grace of the clean, delicately —­ granulated columnar stems, the largest four feet in diameter, at twenty from the ground.  The innumerable blossoms, mingling with those of other trees scarcely less beautiful, although infinitely less majestic, filled the valley with more than Arabian perfumes.

The general floor of the amphitheatre was grass of the same character as that I had found in the road; if anything, more deliciously soft, thick, velvety, and miraculously green.  It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been attained.

I have spoken of two openings into the vale.  From the one to the northwest issued a rivulet, which came, gently murmuring and slightly foaming, down the ravine, until it dashed against the group of rocks out of which sprang the insulated hickory.  Here, after encircling the tree, it passed on a little to the north of east, leaving the tulip tree some twenty feet to the south, and making no decided alteration in its course until it came near the midway between the eastern and western boundaries of the valley.  At this point, after a series of sweeps, it turned off at right angles and pursued a generally southern direction meandering as it went —­ until it became lost in a small lake of irregular figure (although roughly oval), that lay gleaming near the lower extremity of the vale.  This lakelet was, perhaps, a hundred yards in diameter at its widest part.  No crystal could be clearer than its waters.  Its bottom, which could be distinctly seen, consisted altogether, of pebbles brilliantly white.  Its banks, of the emerald grass already described, rounded, rather than sloped, off into the clear heaven below; and so clear was this heaven, so perfectly, at times, did it reflect all objects above it, that where the true bank ended and where the mimic one commenced, it was a point of no little difficulty to determine.  The trout, and some other varieties of fish, with which this pond seemed to be almost inconveniently crowded, had all the appearance of veritable flying-fish.  It was almost impossible to believe that they were not absolutely suspended in the air.  A light birch canoe that lay placidly on the water, was reflected in its minutest fibres with a fidelity unsurpassed by the most exquisitely polished mirror.  A small island, fairly laughing with flowers in full bloom, and affording little more space than just enough for a picturesque little building, seemingly a fowl-house —­ arose from the lake not far from its northern shore —­ to which it was connected by means of an inconceivably light —­ looking and yet very primitive bridge.  It was formed of a single, broad and thick plank of the tulip wood.  This was forty feet long, and spanned the interval between shore and shore with a slight but very perceptible arch, preventing all oscillation.  From the southern extreme of the lake issued a continuation of the rivulet, which, after meandering for, perhaps, thirty yards, finally passed through the “depression” (already described) in the middle of the southern declivity, and tumbling down a sheer precipice of a hundred feet, made its devious and unnoticed way to the Hudson.