Excerpt from At Home and Abroad: A Sketch-Book of Life, Scenery and Men Nature played all sorts Of wild and picturesque pranks with the property. Two heaps Of stones were all that marked the site of the house and barn; half a dozen ragged plum and peach trees hovered around the outskirts of the vanished garden, the melancholy survivors Of all its bloom and fruitage and a mixture Of tall sedge-grass, sumacs, and blackberry bushes covered the fields. The hawthorn hedges which lined the lane had disappeared, but some clumps of privet still held their ground, and the wild grape and scarlet-berried celastrus clambered all over the tall sassafras and tulip-trees. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.