ever with fashion, which even renders the faults of the great, subjects of admiration.
Marmaduke bore this deformity in his dwelling with great good nature, and soon contrived, by his own improvements, to give an air both of respectability and comfort to his place of residence; still there was much of incongruity, even immediately about the mansion house. Although poplars had been brought from Europe to ornament the grounds, and willows and other trees were gradually springing up nigh the dwelling, yet many a pile of snow betrayed the presence of the stump of a mighty pine; and even, in one or two in— stances, unsightly remnants of trees that had been partly destroyed by fire, were seen rearing their black and glistening columns, for twenty or thirty feet above the pure white of the snow. These, which in the language of the country are termed stubbs, abounded in the open fields adjacent to the village, and were accompanied, occasionally, by the ruin of a pine or a hemlock that had been stripped of its bark, and which waved in melancholy grandeur its naked limbs to the blast, a skeleton of its former glory. But these unpleasant additions to the view were unnoticed by the delighted Elizabeth, who, as the horses slowly moved down the side of the mountain, saw only in gross, the cluster of houses that lay like a map at her feet; the fifty smokes, that were diagonally curling from the valley to the clouds; the frozen lake, as it lay embedded in mountains of evergreen, with the long shadows of the pines on its white surface, lengthening in the setting sun; the dark riband of water, that gushed from the outlet, and was winding its way already, towards the far distant Chesapeake—the altered, though still remembered, scenes of her childhood and of joy!
