There should be grand occasions for such as you in a country like this, with its unlimited future." They came presently into a region of cultivation, fields which would be green with grain in the spring, showing here and there, and the smoke from the chimney of a stout log house rising now and then.
Where a creek broke into a swift white fall stood a grist mill, and from a wood the sound of axes was heard.
Robert's vivid imagination, which responded to all changes, kindled at once.

He liked the wilderness, and it always made a great impression upon him, and he also took the keenest interest and delight in everything that civilization could offer.

Now his spirit leaped up to meet what lay before him.
He found at Mount Johnson comfort and luxury that he had not expected, an abundance of all that the wilderness furnished, mingled with importations from Europe.

He slept in a fine bed, he looked into more books, he saw on the walls reproductions of Titian and Watteau, and also pictures of race horses that had made themselves famous at Newmarket, he wrote letters to Albany on good paper, he could seal them with either black or red wax, and there were musical instruments upon one or two of which he could play.
Robert found all these things congenial.

The luxury or what might have seemed luxury on the border, had in it nothing of decadence.