CHAPTER XI.
What a change, from the little gray cottage in the woods to the pillared walls of Grandison Place.
This ancestral looking mansion was situated on the brow of a long, winding hill, which commanded a view of the loveliest valley in the world.

A bold, sweeping outline of distant hills, here and there swelling into mountains, and crowned with a deeper, mistier blue, divided the rich green of the earth from the azure of the heavens.

Far as the eye could reach, it beheld the wildest luxuriance of nature refined and subdued by the hand of cultivation and taste.

Man had reverenced the grandeur of the Creator, and made the ploughshare turn aside from the noble shade-tree, and left the streams rejoicing in their margins of verdure; and far off, far away beneath the shadow of the misty blue hills,--of a paler, more leaden hue,--the waters of the great sea seemed ready to roll down on the vale, that lay smiling before it.
Built of native granite, with high massive walls and low turreted roof, Grandison Place rose above the surrounding buildings in castellated majesty.

It stood in the centre of a spacious lawn, zoned by a girdle of oaks, beneath whose dense shade the dew sparkled even at noonday.