Turn now and look from the north to the west. You stand at the apex of a triangle, the water-shed of the Rivanna, the opposite side, at the base of the Blue Ridge, forty miles in length; its perpendicular twenty, descending five hundred feet to the base of your position, where the Rivanna concentrates its muddy waters over an artificial cascade, marked by its white line of foam. West and southwest, the space between the Southwest Mountains and the Blue Ridge is filled by irregular mountains, the nearer known as the Ragged Mountains. At the northeast base of these, distant two and three miles, are Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, forming nuclei connected by a scattered village. From west to northeast no mountain interposes between your position and the base of the Blue Ridge, which sinks below the horizon eighty or one hundred miles distant. Two mountains only are seen northeast--one ten, the other forty miles off. The country, ascending from your position, and presenting to you its fertile slopes, gives the view of one highly cultivated. The railroad train is traced ten miles. This is the view so much admired. The top of the mountain has been levelled by art. This space is six hundred by two hundred feet, circular at each end. The mountain slopes gently on every side from this lawn; one hundred feet from the eastern end stands the mansion. Its projecting porticoes, east and west, with the width of the house, occupy one hundred feet each way. It approaches on either hand within fifty feet of the brow of the mountain, with which it is connected by covered ways ten feet wide, whose floors are level with the cellars, and whose flat roofs, forming promenades, are nearly level with the first floor of the dwelling. These, turning at right angles at the brow, and widening to twenty feet, extend one hundred feet, and terminate in one-story pavilions twenty feet square, the space beneath these terraces forming basement offices. From this northern terrace the view is sublime; and here Jefferson and his company were accustomed to sit, bare-headed, in the summer until bed-time, having neither dew nor insects to annoy them. Here, perhaps, has been assembled more love of liberty, virtue, wisdom, and learning than on any other private spot in America. Jefferson's grandson, Colonel Jefferson Randolph, writes of his appearance and manners thus: