Crossing at any one of these points, you gain the open heights upon the main. Here you are first struck by the aspect of the soil, everywhere having huge masses of dark rock protruded above its surface. The country is said to be poor: of this I cannot judge, but I know it to be beautiful. It is everywhere undulating, and often broken in the wildest and most tropical manner. Like the interior of Herefordshire, it is cut up in all directions by rural lanes, bordered by stone walls and high hedges, and dotted thickly with handsome houses, whose verandahs of bright green, and whitened walls, show well amidst the luxuriant foliage by which they are commonly surrounded. About five miles from the city are a couple of delightful pieces of water, called Jamaica and Fresh-ponds; each bordered by wood, lawn, and meadow, naturally disposed in the most attractive manner. At the last-named pond,--which sounds unworthily on my ear when applied to a piece of water covering a surface of two hundred and fifty acres,--I passed an afternoon during the period of my first visit here. We sailed about, exploring every harbour of the little sea, caught our fish for dinner, and by the hotel were furnished with a well-broiled chicken and a good glass of champagne, with ice worthy of being dissolved in such liquor. I fell premeditatedly in love with the place; and D----, who was on the look-out for a location, and something hard to please withal, had already selected a site for building: but, alas! even Paradise, before the mission of St. Patrick, had serpents; and the delightful copses and rich meadows of Fresh-pond are, it appears, the haunts especially favoured by the incarnation of all Egyptian plagues, musquitoes. During the winter this is a great resort of the lovers of _bandy_ and _skating_; and from this ample reservoir is taken that transparent ice which gladdens the eyes and cools the throat of the dust-dried traveller throughout this part of the State. Nor is its grateful service confined to these limits; for cargoes of it are, during the spring, regularly shipped to the Havannah, New Orleans, Mobile, &c.; and,--for where will enterprise find limits?--this very season has a shipment of three hundred tons of the congealed waters of this pond of Massachusetts been consigned to Calcutta. Ice floating on the Ganges! How old Gunga will shiver and shake his ears when the first crystal offering is dropped on his hot bosom! Wild as the idea may at first appear of keeping such a commodity for a voyage of probably a hundred days in such latitudes, I am informed the speculator is assured, that with an ordinary run, enough of his cargo may be landed to pay a good freight.[4]