128 THE NOBTJIERX MOUNTAINS. 



\vlK)le materials of the house had been cut on the spot, 

 and cost nothing. 



As for the situation of the little oasis in the wilder- 

 ness, it bespoke good sense and good taste. Tlie owner 

 luid stumbled, in his forest wanderings, on a spot where 

 two mountain streams, after nearly meeting, parted again, 

 and enclosed in a ring a hill some hundred feet high, before 

 they finally joined each other below. That ring was his 

 estate ; which was formally christened on the occasion of 

 our visit, Avoca the meeting of the waters ; a name, 

 as all ac^reed, full of remembrances of tlie Old World and 

 the land of his remote ancestors ; and yet like enough 

 to one of the graceful and sonorous Indian names of the 

 island not to seem barbarous and out of place. Round 

 the clearing the mountain woods surged up a thousand feet 

 aloft : but so gradually, and so far off, as to allow free 

 circulation of air and a broad sheet of sky overhead ; and as 

 the camp stood on the highest point of the rise, it did not 

 give that choking and crushing sensation of being in a ditch, 

 which makes houses in most mountain valleys to me at 

 least intolerable. Up one glen, toward the south, we had a 

 full view of the green Cerro of Arima, three thousand feet 

 in height ; and down another, to the north-east, was a great 

 gate in the mountains, through which we could hear though 

 not see the surf rolling upon the rocks three miles away. 



