On a little hill which had once led up to Parson's barn, but now ended quite abruptly in a little precipice with a broad railing on its edge and a summer-house a little back, one could sit and look out over the stretch of bright green lawns, between two clumps of hemlocks, and over a hedge which concealed the ground beyond, along the whole length of the vista made by Becker Street, which obligingly descended slightly from the edge of the park so that its houses were concealed by the hemlocks, and then out upon the country beyond, and to the beautiful hills against the sky; and such a one might well imagine, should he be a stranger, that all he saw was in the Grove of the Incas. Upon all the outer edges of this park there were masses of shrubbery, or little lines of hedge, irregularly disposed, with bits of grass opening upon the street, and here and there a line of slender iron railing with a group of statuary back of it, and so the people when they walked that way scarcely knew when they entered the park, or when they left it. The home of Mrs. Cliff, itself, had seemed to her to be casting off its newness and ripening into the matured home. Much of this was due to work which had been done upon the garden and surrounding grounds, but much more was due to the imperceptible influence of the Misses Thorpedyke. These ladies had not only taken with them to the house so many of the time-honored objects which they had saved from their old home, but they had brought to bear upon everything around them the courtly tastes of the olden time. Willy Croup had declared, as she stood in the hall gazing up at the staircase, that it often seemed to her, since she came back, as if her grandfather had been in the habit of coming down those stairs. "I never saw him," she said, "and I don't know what sort of stairs he used to come down, but there's something about all this which makes me think of things far back and grand, and I know from what I've heard of him that he would have liked to come down such stairs." Mrs. Horn and her husband had made a long visit to Mrs. Cliff, and they had departed early in the summer for a great property they had bought in the West, which included mountains, valleys, a canon, and such far extending groves of golden fruit that Edna already called the Captain "The Prince of Orange."