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The view in the front is bounded at the distance of three miles, by round-backed hills; to the eastward and westward lie the Winter and Round-rock Lakes, which are connected by the Winter River, whose banks are well clothed with pines, and ornamented with a profusion of mosses, lichens, and shrubs.

In the rear, on the other side of the hall, was the kitchen with its big brick oven, its yawning fireplace overhung with corpulent iron pots or shining copper kettles depending from numerous gallows-like cranes; with its glittering copper, brass and pewter utensils arrayed on snowy-shelves; with its spotless tables, Its freshly-sanded floor and its heavily-beamed, whitewashed ceiling, from which hung many a bunch of savory herbs or string of red pepper-pods or bunch of seed-corn, or perhaps even a round-backed ham, to get a little browner in the smoke that would sometimes pour out from the half-ignited mass of peat.

Perhaps by being debarred from the contemplation of maternal love in its humanity, they more clearly comprehended its divinity. Look at the little round-backed nestling child in Fra Angelico's Madonna della Stella, imperfect as it is in form, the whole spirit of love is in it.

Her figure and face both told her breed at once: here was an old English pastoral beauty; not the round-backed, narrow-chested cottager, but the well-fed, erect rustic, with broad, full bust and massive shoulder, and arm as hard as a rock with health and constant use; a hand finely cut, though neither small nor very white, and just a little hard inside, compared with Luxury's soft palm; a face honest, fair, and rather large than small; not beautiful, but exceedingly comely; a complexion not pink and white, but that delicately blended brickdusty color, which tints the whole cheek in fine gradation, outlasts other complexions twenty years, and beautifies the true Northern, even in old age.

The hills in this part are lower and more round-backed than those we passed yesterday, exhibiting but little naked rock; they were covered with lichens.

Rixa pompously blew out his cheeks and put back his shoulders in a way he had to convince himself he was not getting old and round-backed. "Oh," said he, "Jean Clerk's a relative; he'll be going to bide there."