LANDORāS COTTAGE
DURING A pedestrian trip last summer, through one or two of the river counties of New York, I found myself, as the day declined, somewhat embarrassed about the road I was pursuing. The land undulated very remarkably; and my path, for the last hour, had wound about and about so confusedly, in its effort to keep in the valleys, that I no longer knew in what direction lay the sweet village of B-, where I had determined to stop for the night. The sun had scarcely shone -- strictly speaking -- during the day, which nevertheless, had been unpleasantly warm. A smoky mist, resembling that of the Indian summer, enveloped all things, and of course, added to my uncertainty. Not that I cared much about the matter. If I did not hit upon the village before sunset, or even before dark, it was more than possible that a little Dutch farmhouse, or something of that kind, would soon make its appearance -- although, in fact, the neighborhood (perhaps on account of being more picturesque than fertile) was very sparsely inhabited. At all events, with my knapsack for a pillow, and my hound as a sentry, a bivouac in the open air was just the thing which would have amused me. I sauntered on, therefore, quite at ease -- Ponto taking charge of my gun -- until at length, just as I had begun to consider whether the numerous little glades that led hither and thither, were intended to be paths at all, I was conducted by one of them into an unquestionable carriage track. There could be no mistaking it. The traces of light wheels were evident; and although the tall shrubberies and overgrown undergrowth met overhead, there was no obstruction whatever below, even to the passage of a Virginian mountain wagon -- the most aspiring vehicle, I take it, of its kind. The road, however, except in being open through the wood -- if wood be not too weighty a name for such an assemblage of light trees -- and except in the particulars of evident wheel-tracks -- bore no resemblance to any road I had before seen. The tracks of which I speak were but faintly perceptible -- having been impressed upon the firm, yet pleasantly moist surface of -- what looked more like green Genoese velvet than any thing else. It was grass, clearly -- but grass such as we seldom see out of England -- so short, so thick, so even, and so vivid in color. Not a single impediment lay in the wheel-route -- not even a chip or dead twig. The stones that once obstructed the way had been carefully placed -- not thrown-along the sides of the lane, so as to define its boundaries at bottom with a kind of half-precise, half-negligent, and wholly picturesque definition. Clumps of wild flowers grew everywhere, luxuriantly, in the interspaces.
What to make of all this, of course I knew not. Here was art undoubtedly -- that did not surprise me -- all roads, in the ordinary sense, are works of art; nor can I say that there was much to wonder at in the mere excess of art manifested; all that seemed to have been done, might have been done here -- with such natural ācapabilitiesā (as they have it in the books on Landscape Gardening) -- with very little labor and expense. No; it was not the amount but the character of the art which caused me to take a seat on one of the blossomy stones and gaze up and down this fairy -- like avenue for half an hour or more in bewildered admiration. One thing became more and more evident the longer I gazed: an artist, and one with a most scrupulous eye for form, had superintended all these arrangements. The greatest care had been taken to preserve a due medium bet...