Turn once more, and mark how, like a serpent creeping through the thrifty herbage, the road leads, from the bridge where we stand, across the level ground and up the bank! See where it begins to curve back from the fall, till it is lost amid the trees and shrubbery which but half conceal that cluster of white houses standing against the sky so far above us, and looking so quiet and rural among the fresh trees. Can any thing appear more religious than that white church in their midst, rising from its bed of vegetation and throwing the shadow of its taper steeple aslant the graves that are gathered to the very brink of the hill? How distinct are the white gravestones and the long grass shivering among them! My mother’s grave is there beneath the old oak standing alone in that solitary graveyard. My playmates never went with me there, but often have I lingered beneath that old tree, listening to the music of its restless leaves, and the rushing waters below me, till aspirations awoke in my young heart, holy and deep as ever the pride of my womanhood has known. At nightfall I have wandered amid those graves—a little child, and yet fearless—till the stars have stationed themselves in the blue heavens above me, and the fireflies have flashed their tiny brilliants among the grass, like gentle spirits sent to light up the places of the dead; and thoughts, for which I had no name, would fill my heart with pleasant sadness till I went away, reluctantly, amid feelings that haunted me at night as I listened to the acorns rattling from the oak trees over the roof of our house, and colored my dreams long after the dash of the waterfall had lulled me to sleep. I have wearied you, with my reminiscences, so you have turned away from the houses on Fall’s-hill, to those on the opposite bank, which we have scarcely noticed yet. The hill which forms this side of the valley, is neither so lofty nor picturesque as the other. You will observe that the road branches off at that end of the bridge—that the turnpike which lends to the old Presbyterian meeting-house, and the dwellings which surround it, is cut through the bank some thirty feet down, but forms a steep ascent to the most thickly settled portion of our village. The roof of our old meeting-house—the belfry of our new academy, with the third story window blinds, all fresh and verdant with green paint—half the front of a dry goods store, with the gable end of a red farm-house, are all the signs of life which we can obtain from our station on the bridge—yet the most thrifty and industrious portion of our village is located on School-hill. The Episcopal church, and the white cottages opposite, can boast more of rural beauty, perhaps; but that old meeting-house has stood on School-hill almost a century, and many of the farmers who surround it have grown rich upon lands which they inherited from men who worshiped beneath its roof almost before the rafters were shingled.