Mr. Mitchell is eminently an “author at home.” There are many of our popular writers--both citizens and country dwellers--whose environment is a matter of comparative indifference to their readers. But the farmer of Edgewood has taken the public so pleasantly into his confidence, has welcomed them so cordially to his garden, his orchard and his very hearthstone, that--in a literary sense--we are all his guests and inmates. In the consulship of Plancus--as Thackeray would say--we Freshmen, after our pilgrimage to that shrine of liberty, the Judges’ Cave on West Rock, with its kakographic inscription,--“Oposition [_sic_] to tyrants is obedience to God,”--used to turn our steps southward to burn our youthful incense upon the shrine of literature, and see whether the burs had begun to open on the big chestnut trees that fringed Ik Marvel’s domain. In those days the easiest approach was through the little village of Westville, which nestles at the foot of the rock and seems, from a distance, to lay its church-spire, like a white finger, against the purple face of the cliff. The rustic gate at the northern corner of Edgewood, whence a carriage road led to the ridge behind the house, stood then invitingly open, and a printed notice informed the wayfarer that the grounds were free to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Now, as then, the reveries and dreams of Mr. Mitchell’s early books continue to charm the fireside musings of many a college dreamer; and successive generations of Freshmen still find their footsteps tending, in the golden autumn afternoons of first term, toward the Edgewood gates. But nowadays the pilgrim may take the Chapel Street horse-car at the college fence, and after a ten minutes’ ride, dismounting at the terminus of the line and walking a block to westward, he finds himself at the brink of what our geologists call “the New Haven terrace.” Thence the road descends into the water meadows, and, crossing on a new iron bridge the brackish sluice known as West River, leads straight on across a gravelly level, till it strikes, at a right angle, the foot of the Woodbridge hills and the Old Codrington Road (now Forest Street). On this road lies Edgewood, sloping to the east and south, lifted upon a shelf of land above the river plain, while behind it the hill rises steeply to the height of some hundred feet, and shuts off the west with the border of overhanging woods which gives the place its name.