FAR AND NEAR 



glimpse of the Hudson River between hills or 

 through openings in the trees wears better with me 

 than a long expanse of it constantly spread out be- 

 fore me. One day I had an errand to a farmhouse 

 nestled in a little valley or basin at the foot of a moun- 

 tain. The earth put out protecting arms all about it, 

 — a low hill with an orchard on one side, a sloping 

 pasture on another, and the mountain, with the 

 skirts of its mantling forests, close at hand in the 

 rear. How my heart warmed toward it ! I had been 

 so long perched high upon the banks of a great river, 

 in sight of all the world, exposed to every wind that 

 blows, with a horizon-line that sweeps over half a 

 county, that, quite unconsciously to myself, I was 

 pining for a nook to sit down in. I was hungry for 

 the private and the circumscribed; I knew it when 

 I saw this sheltered farmstead. I had long been rest- 

 less and dissatisfied, — a vague kind of homesick- 

 ness; now I knew the remedy. Hence when, not 

 long afterward, I was offered a tract of wild land, 

 barely a mile from home, that contained a secluded 

 nook and a few acres of level, fertile land shut off 

 from the vain and noisy world of railroads, steam- 

 boats, and yachts by a wooded, precipitous moun- 

 tain, I (piickly closed the bargain, and built me a 

 rustic house there, which I call " Slabsides," because 

 its outer walls are covered with slabs. I might have 

 given it a prettier name, but not one more fit, or more 

 in keeping with the mood that brought me thither 



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