The old house rose
before the Doctor crowning a terraced garden, flanked at the left by a
double avenue of tall elms. The flower-beds were edged with box, which
diffused around it that dreamy balsamic odor, full of ante-natal
reminiscences of a lost Paradise, dimly fragrant as might be the
bdellium of ancient Havilah, the land compassed by the river Pison that
went out of Eden. The garden was somewhat neglected, but not in
disgrace,--and in the time of tulips and hyacinths, of roses, of
"snowballs," of honeysuckles, of lilacs, of syringas, it was rich with
blossoms.
From the front-windows of the mansion the eye reached a far blue
mountain-summit,--no rounded heap, such as often shuts in a
village-landscape, but a sharp peak, clean-angled as Ascutney from the
Dartmouth green. A wide gap through miles of woods had opened this
distant view, and showed more, perhaps, than all the labors of the
architect and the landscape-gardener the large style of the early
Dudleys.
The great stone chimney of the mansion-house was the centre from which
all the artificial features of the scene appeared to flow. The roofs,
the gables, the dormer-windows, the porches, the clustered offices in
the rear, all seemed to crowd about the great chimney.
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