He added a porch in front, and a
central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive
hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which
improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill,
make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after
passing it. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to
no great purpose) in forming the hillside behind the house into
terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems and
branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very
pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and
shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hillside is
covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in
the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a
few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,--the whole forming
rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good
shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the hottest
part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand
or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze
stirring along the sides or brow of the hill.
From the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level
surfaces and gentle, hilly outlines, covered with wood, that
characterize the scenery of Concord. We have not so much as a gleam of
lake or river in the prospect; if there were, it would add greatly to
the value of the place in my estimation.
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