Mitchell’s culture, it will be seen, does not lack that ancestral background which Dr. Holmes thinks so important to the New England Brahmin. Three generations of the name adorn the pages of the Yale Triennial. His grandfather, Stephen Mix Mitchell, graduated in 1763, was a Representative and Senator in Congress and Chief Justice of Connecticut. His father, the Rev. Alfred Mitchell, graduated in 1809, was a Congregational minister at Norwich, in which city Mr. Mitchell was born, April 12, 1822. The statement has been made that “Doctor Johns” was a sketch from the Rev. Alfred Mitchell; but this is not true. Mr. Mitchell’s father died when his son was only eight years old, and though his theology was strictly Calvinistic, his personality made no such impression upon the boy as to enable him to reproduce it so many years after. Some features in the character of “Dr. Johns” were suggested by Dr. Hall, of Ellington, at whose once famous school Mr. Mitchell was for some time a pupil. The name of Donaldus G. Mitchell also appears on the Triennial Catalogue for the year 1792 as borne by a great-uncle of the present “Donaldus,” who took his bachelor’s degree in 1841. Mr. Mitchell’s mother was a Woodbridge, and some four years since he completed an elaborate and sumptuously-printed genealogy of that family, undertaken by his brother but left unfinished at his death. The French windows of the drawing-room open upon the veranda to the south, and this upon a lawny perspective which is at once an example of Mr. Mitchell’s skillful landscape-gardening and a surprise to the stranger, who from the highway has caught only glimpses of sward and shrubbery through the hedge and the fringe of trees. The Edgewood lawn is a soft fold between the instep of the hill and the grassy bank that hangs over the road and carries the hedgerow. It is not very extensive, but the plantations of evergreens and other trees on either side are so artfully disposed, advancing here in capes and retiring there in bays and recesses, that the eye is lured along a seemingly interminable vista of gentle swales and undulations, bordered by richly-varied foliage, along the hillside farms beyond, and far into the heart of the south. Here and there on the steep slope to the right, and high above the lawn itself, are coppices of birch, hazel, alder, dogwood and other native shrubs, brought together years ago and protected by little enclosures, but now grown into considerable trees. North of the house is the neatly-kept garden, with its beds of vegetables and flowers, its rows of currant and gooseberry bushes, its box-edged alleys, and back of all a tall hedge of hemlock, clipped to a dense, smooth wall of dark green, starred with the lighter needles of this year’s growth. Mr. Mitchell tells, with a pardonable pride, how he brought from the woods, in two baskets, all the hemlocks which compose this beautiful screen. He has two workshops,--his library and his garden; and of the two he