INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS XXXIII 



We drove up slowly on second speed, stopping now and 

 then to appreciate the scenery which, to this day, is as 

 lovely as when Herbert smoking- his Keg»lia with his 

 friend Harry — ribbons in hands "assisted by the rare 

 mouths of his e-xquisitely-bitted cattle" piloted the party 

 to the summit years before. 



Witli my notes and those of Mr. Pond, for he, too, had 

 made notes of such points as he deemed we would find ol 

 interest and could be checked off at this later day, wc 

 drove slowly and eagerly looked for Greenwood Lake. 



"The loveliest sheet of water my eyes had ever 

 seen, varying- from half a mile to a mile in 

 breadth and about five miles long with shores 

 indented deeply with the capes and promontories 

 of the wood-clothed hills which sink abruptly to 

 its very margin." 



We spied it down in the valley to the left lying like a 

 mirror in a broad frame of velvet, and as Forester said 

 "called by the monsters here 'Long Pond'." 



Forester makes Archer tell about the fish he caught and 

 the deer he killed with the ball through its heart at Green- 

 ■wood Lake and then bids the reader wait until they cross 

 the hill, the Bellvale Mountain, where there is a finer view 

 yet. There on the summit, as he decades before had 

 pulled up, so did we, and quoting him : 



"Never did I see a landscape more extensively 

 magnificent. Ridge after ridge the mountain 

 sloped down from our feet into a vast rich basin 

 ten miles at least in breadth, by thirty, if not 

 more in length, girdled on every side by moun- 

 tains — the whole diversified with wood and water, 

 meadow, and pasture-land, and cornfield — studd- 

 e<l with small villages — with more than one 

 bright lakelet glittering like beaten gold in the 

 declining sun, and several isolated hills standing 

 up boldly from the vale!" 



"Glorious indeed! Most glorious!" Forester exclaimed, 

 and we must echo his words, for years had not changed 

 the view of the pastoral valley before us guarded by high 

 hills. He called it "the vale of the Sugar-loaf", named 

 from the cone-like hill near the pond eight hundred feet 



