Mr. and Mrs. Willis, with their children, had passed the summer of 1850 at Cornwall, in the highlands of the Hudson, boarding at the farmhouse of a Mrs. Sutherland. They grew so attached to the beautiful neighborhood that they resolved to make it their home some day, and with this in view, in the fall of the same year, they had bought the fifty acres of land which afterwards became widely known as Idlewild. This little domain lay upon a shelf or terrace on the western bank of the Hudson, lifted some two hundred feet above the level of the river, at the point where its waters received the slender tribute of Moodna Creek. Behind the site chosen for the house was a wild ravine, shaded by hemlocks, at the bottom of which a brook, swollen to sizable rapids and cascades by the spring freshets, but a mere trickle in midsummer, ran down to join the creek. The location seemed destined by nature for a gentleman’s country seat, from its variety of surface, its contrasting prospects, and its noble timber. The outlook in front was upon a wide bend of the river and the opposite heights and distant mountain perspectives of the eastern shore. Behind the house was a private landscape of glen and forest, sunk away quite out of sight of the sails and steamers that passed continually up and down the watery highway before the front door. To the south, a mile away, was the imposing shape of Storm King, a mountain which owes its baptism to Willis, having previously figured in geography as Butter Hill. Four miles below this were West Point and the gate of the highlands, and on the other bank General Morris’s summer home of Undercliff. Four miles above Idlewild was the considerable town of Newburg, for a market; and only a mile from his door, the post office village of Moodna. Willis’s trip to the tropics had been of small benefit to his health, and, on his return in the summer of 1852, he joined his family at their boarding place at Cornwall. His doctor warned him that a return to New York would be at the risk of his life. He had grown tired, himself, of the city and of gay society, and longed for the repose of the hills. _Levavit oculos ad arces._ In the hope that rural quiet and the drier air of the highlands might restore his health, he decided that autumn to begin building at once, and to take up his permanent abode in the country. During the winter and spring he remained with his family at the Sutherlands’, and busied himself in superintending the erection of his house, laying out roads and paths, cutting vistas through his trees, building stone walls, constructing a dam for his brook, and reporting progress in gossipy letters to the “Home Journal.” In the spring of 1853 the New York house was sold, and on the 26th of July Idlewild received its tenants.