I was somewhat curious, the next morning, to judge for myself of the situation of our new dwelling, after the very unfavourable accounts Mr. Meredith had given me, but I found his descriptions most faithful. The cottage occupied the top of a slight slope, which was so far cleared that the chief of the great trees had been cut down, but not cut up, and the enormous dead trunks, lying over and under and across each other, made a most melancholy foreground to the everlasting forest, which bounded the narrow view on all sides, like a high dense screen. Two avenues, which had been cut through it in front of the house, gave distant peeps of two other cottages on two other slopes, and gum-trees again, behind. No one who has any regard for health would, I should think, venture to live in the hollows or flats of the forest, which seem the very strongholds of ague, miasma, and all the other pleasant progeny of swampy woods.

From the back of the house, the close dense forest was the only view; so close, that any one looking for sky from the kitchen door must gaze up to the zenith for it! Altogether, as may well be imagined, our new home was not a cheerful one in its external characteristics; and we soon found it to be exceedingly damp throughout, and very cold.