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"What sweeter place shall we find than this?" said she. "Why should we seek farther for the site of our temple?" It was indeed a delightful spot of earth, though undistinguished by any very prominent beauties, being merely a nook in the shelter of a hill, with the prospect of a distant lake in one direction and of a church-spire in another.

Soon the village of Emd appears on the right, a very considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the gorge of the Visp.

"Why, it looks quite civilized!" exclaimed Colin in surprise, as he saw the well-built, comfortable frame houses and a stone church-spire which stood out boldly from the hill above the wharf. "When I first saw St. Paul," said the old whaler, "it looked just about the way it was when the Russians left it huts and shacks o' the worst kind an' the natives were kep' just about half starved."

Indeed, there was one corner of the road, whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the valley between sloping fir-woods, with a triangular snatch of plain by way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and moralise in before returning homewards; and the peasants got so much into the habit of finding him there in the twilight that they gave it the name of "Will o' the Mill's Corner."

Here and there a few apple-trees stand together on a knoll. The quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church-spire against the sky.

Inland, we saw a hundred farms, groves without number, divers roads, a hamlet within a mile of us, an old-fashioned extinguisher-looking church-spire, and various houses of wood painted white, with here and there a piece of rustic antiquity in bricks, or stone, washed with lime; or some livelier paint; for the Dutch of New York had brought the habits of Holland with them, delighting in colours.

Mark's spirits fell instantly. "Is he worse?" he asked. A tear was the only answer. He asked Mr. Alford to go for Mildred. "She has just come," said Lizzie. They found Mr. Hardwick propped up in bed, whence he could look out of the window. The church-spire rose on the one hand, and on the other the chimney of the shop was seen above the trees on the river-bank.

Clara gazed over rolling richness of foliage, wood and water, and a church-spire, a town and horizon hills. There sung a sky-lark. "Not even the bird that does not fly away!" she said; meaning, she had no heart for the bird satisfied to rise and descend in this place. Laetitia travelled to some notion, dim and immense, of Miss Middleton's fever of distaste.