Woodmen were busy with destructive axes upon a body of native trees at the left of our road. They had opened to our sight a view heretofore hidden by the wood. A lake, blue and tranquil as the heavens it mirrored; green slopes, running down to the water; wooded heights, bordering the thither banks, and around, as far as the eye could reach, mountains, benignant in outline and verdant to their summits, billowing, range beyond range, against the horizon—why had we never seen this before? It was like a section of the Delectable Mountains, gently lowered from Bunyan’s Beulah Land, and set down within thirty miles of the biggest city in America.
The rapt silence was ended by one word from my companion:
“Alabama!”
He passed the reins into my hands, and leaped over the wheel. Making his way down the hill, he stopped to talk with the workmen for ten minutes. Then he came back, held up a hand to help me out of the carriage, and lifted “Brownie” in his arms. Next, he tied the horse to a tree, and, saying to me—“Come!” led the way to the lake.
We bought the tract, in imagination, and decided upon the site of our cottage, in the next half-hour. On the way home we called upon the owner of the tract, paid a hundred dollars down to bind the bargain, and left orders that not another tree was to be felled until further notice.
It would have been expecting too much of human nature had we been required to go back to the farm-house dinner, without driving again by “Our Land.” The happy silence of the second survey culminated in my declaration and the instant assent of my companion to the same:
“And we will name it ‘Sunnybank’!”