The writer visited the hill Cumorah on the 22nd of February, 1897, and the same day wrote out the following description of it: The hill Cumorah is on the road between Manchester and the town of Palmyra, in Wayne county, New York, about four miles directly south of the latter place. Approaching it from the north, you are confronted by the bold face of the hill, which rises quite abruptly from the common level of the surrounding country; and as the east and west slopes of the hill, as viewed from the north, are about equal and regular, it looks from a distance as if it might be a huge conical-shaped mound. Ascending its steep north side to the summit dispels the illusion, for one finds that he has but climbed the abrupt north end of a ridge of hill having its greatest extent from north to south, and which from its very narrow summit broadens and slopes gently to the southward until it sinks to the level of the common country. The east side of the hill is now ploughed, but the west side is untouched by the husbandman; and about two or three hundred yards from the north end there is on the west side a small grove of young trees, with here and there a decaying stump of a large tree to bear witness that the hill was once covered with a heavy growth of timber. In fact it was so covered by timber when the Prophet Joseph Smith first visited the place in 1823, as indeed much of the surrounding country was at that time. Unquestionably Cumorah is the most distinct land mark in all that section of country, the highest hill, and the most commanding in what I should describe as an extensive plain sloping northward filled with numerous irregular hills, but which in the main have their greatest extent, like Cumorah, from north to south; and which, also like Cumorah, are generally highest at the north end. I observed this to be the case all the way from Syracuse to Palmyra. It is worthy of note, too, that the lakes of central and western New York, also have their greatest extent from north to south. Indeed, for the most part, they are but long strips of water left in their narrow beds when the great body of water, which in ages long gone by once covered this whole region, receded northward and gave the same general form both to the lakes and to the hills on this northern slope of the water shed which runs from east to west through New York, north Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana; and which separates the basin of the great lakes and the valley of the St. Lawrence from the valley of the Ohio and Mississippi.