CROPS AND PROFITS 



THE HILL LAND 



BEFORE we keep company farther— the 

 reader and I— let me spread before him. 

 as well as I may, a map of the farm 

 land. I may describe it, in gross, as a great 

 parallelogram, intersected by the quiet public 

 highway, which divides it into two great 

 squares. The eastern square is, for the most 

 part, as level as the carpet on my library floor, 

 and its crops make checkers like the figures 

 on the ingrain. The eastern half is toward 

 the town; and upon its edge, by the highway, 

 are the farm buildings I have grouped around 

 the stone cottage. The western half is rolling ; 

 and beyond the whitey-gray farmhouse, with 

 which I entered upon my portraiture, it heaves 

 up into a great billow of hill, half banded with 

 woodland, and half green with pasture. 



This billow of hill, dipped down between my 

 home and the stone cottage, into a little valley, 

 which I have transmuted, as before described, 

 into a lawn of grass land, with its clumps of 



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