The drives are probably better kept and the lawns better groomed than they were in the early fifties, and the shade trees are taller and more dense ; but one step aside over the edge of the wooded declivity instantly translates the pilgrim into a "land of faery," where the hand of man has not interfered except with the consummate art that conceals art. From the commencement of the descent the sound of the stream far below comes up through the rustling foliage. The tops of the trees that grow along the bottom of the glen are below the level of the eye, and the crowding companies of birch and hemlock, chestnut and maple, swarm the hillside.

The glen of Idlewild [Willis said] is but a morning's ramble in extent -- a kind of Trenton Falls for one -- but its stream, falling over a hundred feet within one's own gate, and sometimes a cataract that would bring down a lumber sloop or raft; it has varieties of charm that will at least occupy what loving I have time for.

Step by step in a zigzag course the visitor gets toward that stream that is "sometimes a cataract," and, with every moment the remoteness from human life increases. If it was ever true that " Idlewild is getting fast peopled with the viewless crowd that will make haunted ground of it," the gentle ghosts must have departed with him for whom they first appeared. I could imagine Willis there -- Willis and the Irishman who wielded axe and spade at his command; but the people he had conjured into the glen are all gone --