My Farm of Edgewood Author:Donald G. Mitchell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CItOPS AND PROFITS. The Hill Land.. EFOEE we keep company farther — the reader -— and I — let me spread before him, as well as I may, a map of the farm lan... more »d. 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 native trees and flowering shrubs, and its little pool, under the willows, that receives the drainage. Elsewhere, beyond, and higher, the surface of the hill was scarred with stones of all shapes and sizes; orderly geology would have been at fault amid its debris ; — there were boulders of trap, with clean sharp fissures breaking through them ; — there were great flat fragments of gneiss covered with gray lichens ; — there were pure granitic rocks worn round, — perhaps by the play of some waves that have been hushed these thousand years; and there were exceptional fragments of coarse red sandstone, frittered half away by centuries of rain, and leaving protruding pimples of harder pebbles. In short, Professor Johnston, who advised (in Scotland) the determination of a farm purchase by the character of the subjacent and a...« less