One September night a family had gathered round their hearth and piled
it high with the driftwood of mountain-streams, the dry cones of the
pine, and the splintered ruins of great trees that had come crashing
down the precipice. Up the chimney roared the fire, and brightened the
room with its broad blaze. The faces of the father and mother had a
sober gladness; the children laughed. The eldest daughter was the image
of Happiness at seventeen, and the aged grandmother, who sat knitting
in the warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old. They had
found the “herb heart’s-ease” in the bleakest spot of all New England.
This family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the
wind was sharp throughout the year and pitilessly cold in the winter,
giving their cottage all its fresh inclemency before it descended on
the valley of the Saco. They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one,
for a mountain towered above their heads so steep that the stones would
often rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight.
The daughter had just uttered some simple jest that filled them all
with mirth, when the wind came through the Notch and seemed to pause
before their cottage, rattling the door with a sound of wailing and
lamentation before it passed into the valley. For a moment it saddened
them, though there was nothing unusual in the tones. But the family
were glad again when they perceived that the latch was lifted by some
traveller whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast which
heralded his approach and wailed as he was entering and went moaning
away from the door.
Though they dwelt in such a solitude, these people held daily converse
with the world. The romantic pass of the Notch is a great artery
through which the life-blood of internal commerce is continually
throbbing between Maine on one side and the Green Mountains and the
shores of the St. Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew up
before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but his
staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness
might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of
the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the
teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night, and,
if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime and steal a
kiss from the mountain-maid at parting. It was one of those primitive
taverns where the traveller pays only for food and lodging, but meets
with a homely kindness beyond all price. When the footsteps were heard,
therefore, between the outer door and the inner one, the whole family
rose up, grandmother, children and all, as if about to welcome some one
who belonged to them, and whose fate was linked with theirs.
The door was opened by a young man. His face at first wore the
melancholy expression, almost despondency, of one who travels a wild
and bleak road at nightfall and alone, but soon brightened up when he
saw the kindly warmth of his reception. He felt his heart spring
forward to meet them all, from the old woman who wiped a chair with her
apron to the little child that held out its arms to him. One glance and
smile placed the stranger on a footing of innocent familiarity with the
eldest daughter.
“Ah! this fire is the right thing,” cried he, “especially when there is
such a pleasant circle round it. I am quite benumbed, for the Notch is
just like the pipe of a great pair of bellows; it has blown a terrible
blast in my face all the way from Bartlett.”
“Then you are going toward Vermont?” said the master of the house as he
helped to take a light knapsack off the young man’s shoulders.
“Yes, to Burlington, and far enough beyond,” replied he. “I meant to
have been at Ethan Crawford’s to-night, but a pedestrian lingers along
such a road as this. It is no matter; for when I saw this good fire and
all your cheerful faces, I felt as if you had kindled it on purpose for
me and were waiting my arrival. So I shall sit down among you and make
myself at home.”
The frank-hearted stranger had just drawn his chair to the fire when
something like a heavy footstep was heard without, rushing down the
steep side of the mountain as with long and rapid strides, and taking
such a leap in passing the cottage as to strike the opposite precipice.
The family held their breath, because they knew the sound, and their
guest held his by instinct.
“The old mountain has thrown a stone at us for fear we should forget
him,” said the landlord, recovering himself. “He sometimes nods his
head and threatens to come down, but we are old neighbors, and agree
together pretty well, upon the whole. Besides, we have a sure place of
refuge hard by if he should be coming in good earnest.”
Let us now suppose the stranger to have finished his supper of bear’s
meat, and by his natural felicity of manner to have placed himself on a
footing of kindness with the whole family; so that they talked as
freely together as if he belonged to their mountain-brood. He was of a
proud yet gentle spirit, haughty and reserved among the rich and great,
but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door and be like
a brother or a son at the poor man’s fireside. In the household of the
Notch he found warmth and simplicity of feeling, the pervading
intelligence of New England, and a poetry of native growth which they
had gathered when they little thought of it from the mountain-peaks and
chasms, and at the very threshold of their romantic and dangerous
abode. He had travelled far and alone; his whole life, indeed, had been
a solitary path, for, with the lofty caution of his nature, he had kept
himself apart from those who might otherwise have been his companions.
The family, too, though so kind and hospitable, had that consciousness
of unity among themselves and separation from the world at large which
in every domestic circle should still keep a holy place where no
stranger may intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled
the refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple
mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same free
confidence. And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred of a
common fate a closer tie than that of birth?
The secret of the young man’s character was a high and abstracted
ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not
to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to
hope, and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty that,
obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway,
though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when posterity
should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present, they would
trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meaner glories
faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from his cradle to his
tomb with none to recognize him.
“As yet,” cried the stranger, his cheek glowing and his eye flashing
with enthusiasm—“as yet I have done nothing. Were I to vanish from the
earth to-morrow, none would know so much of me as you—that a nameless
youth came up at nightfall from the valley of the Saco, and opened his
heart to you in the evening, and passed through the Notch by sunrise,
and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, ‘Who was he? Whither did
the wanderer go?’ But I cannot die till I have achieved my destiny.
Then let Death come: I shall have built my monument.”
There was a continual flow of natural emotion gushing forth amid
abstracted reverie which enabled the family to understand this young
man’s sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quick
sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which he had
been betrayed.
“You laugh at me,” said he, taking the eldest daughter’s hand and
laughing himself. “You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were to
freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington only that people
might spy at me from the country roundabout. And truly that would be a
noble pedestal for a man’s statue.”
“It is better to sit here by this fire,” answered the girl, blushing,
“and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us.”
“I suppose,” said her father, after a fit of musing, “there is
something natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had been
turned that way, I might have felt just the same.—It is strange, wife,
how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty certain
never to come to pass.”
“Perhaps they may,” observed the wife. “Is the man thinking what he
will do when he is a widower?”
“No, no!” cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. “When
I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine too. But I was wishing
we had a good farm in Bartlett or Bethlehem or Littleton, or some other
township round the White Mountains, but not where they could tumble on
our heads. I should want to stand well with my neighbors and be called
squire and sent to General Court for a term or two; for a plain, honest
man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I should be grown
quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be long apart, I
might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all crying around me. A
slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble one, with just my
name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know
that I lived an honest man and died a Christian.”
“There, now!” exclaimed the stranger; “it is our nature to desire a
monument, be it slate or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious
memory in the universal heart of man.”
“We’re in a strange way to-night,” said the wife, with tears in her
eyes. “They say it’s a sign of something when folks’ minds go
a-wandering so. Hark to the children!”
They listened accordingly. The younger children had been put to bed in
another room, but with an open door between; so that they could be
heard talking busily among themselves. One and all seemed to have
caught the infection from the fireside circle, and were outvying each
other in wild wishes and childish projects of what they would do when
they came to be men and women. At length a little boy, instead of
addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.
“I’ll tell you what I wish, mother,” cried he: “I want you and father
and grandma’m, and all of us, and the stranger too, to start right away
and go and take a drink out of the basin of the Flume.”
Nobody could help laughing at the child’s notion of leaving a warm bed
and dragging them from a cheerful fire to visit the basin of the
Flume—a brook which tumbles over the precipice deep within the Notch.
The boy had hardly spoken, when a wagon rattled along the road and
stopped a moment before the door. It appeared to contain two or three
men who were cheering their hearts with the rough chorus of a song
which resounded in broken notes between the cliffs, while the singers
hesitated whether to continue their journey or put up here for the
night.
“Father,” said the girl, “they are calling you by name.”
But the good man doubted whether they had really called him, and was
unwilling to show himself too solicitous of gain by inviting people to
patronize his house. He therefore did not hurry to the door, and, the
lash being soon applied, the travellers plunged into the Notch, still
singing and laughing, though their music and mirth came back drearily
from the heart of the mountain.
“There, mother!” cried the boy, again; “they’d have given us a ride to
the Flume.”
Again they laughed at the child’s pertinacious fancy for a
night-ramble. But it happened that a light cloud passed over the
daughter’s spirit; she looked gravely into the fire and drew a breath
that was almost a sigh. It forced its way, in spite of a little
struggle to repress it. Then, starting and blushing, she looked quickly
around the circle, as if they had caught a glimpse into her bosom. The
stranger asked what she had been thinking of.
“Nothing,” answered she, with a downcast smile; “only I felt lonesome
just then.”
“Oh, I have always had a gift of feeling what is in other people’s
hearts,” said he, half seriously. “Shall I tell the secrets of yours?
For I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and
complains of lonesomeness at her mother’s side. Shall I put these
feelings into words?”
“They would not be a girl’s feelings any longer if they could be put
into words,” replied the mountain-nymph, laughing, but avoiding his
eye.
All this was said apart. Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their
hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be
matured on earth; for women worship such gentle dignity as his, and the
proud, contemplative, yet kindly, soul is oftenest captivated by
simplicity like hers. But while they spoke softly, and he was watching
the happy sadness, the lightsome shadows, the shy yearnings, of a
maiden’s nature, the wind through the Notch took a deeper and drearier
sound. It seemed, as the fanciful stranger said, like the choral strain
of the spirits of the blast who in old Indian times had their dwelling
among these mountains and made their heights and recesses a sacred
region. There was a wail along the road as if a funeral were passing.
To chase away the gloom, the family threw pine-branches on their fire
till the dry leaves crackled and the flame arose, discovering once
again a scene of peace and humble happiness. The light hovered about
them fondly and caressed them all. There were the little faces of the
children peeping from their bed apart, and here the father’s frame of
strength, the mother’s subdued and careful mien, the high-browed youth,
the budding girl and the good old grandam, still knitting in the
warmest place.
The aged woman looked up from her task, and with fingers ever busy was
the next to speak.
“Old folks have their notions,” said she, “as well as young ones.
You’ve been wishing and planning and letting your heads run on one
thing and another till you’ve set my mind a-wandering too. Now, what
should an old woman wish for, when she can go but a step or two before
she comes to her grave? Children, it will haunt me night and day till I
tell you.”
“What is it, mother?” cried the husband and wife at once.
Then the old woman, with an air of mystery which drew the circle closer
round the fire, informed them that she had provided her grave-clothes
some years before—a nice linen shroud, a cap with a muslin ruff, and
everything of a finer sort than she had worn since her wedding-day. But
this evening an old superstition had strangely recurred to her. It used
to be said in her younger days that if anything were amiss with a
corpse—if only the ruff were not smooth or the cap did not set
right—the corpse, in the coffin and beneath the clods, would strive to
put up its cold hands and arrange it. The bare thought made her
nervous.
“Don’t talk so, grandmother,” said the girl, shuddering.
“Now,” continued the old woman, with singular earnestness, yet smiling
strangely at her own folly, “I want one of you, my children, when your
mother is dressed and in the coffin,—I want one of you to hold a
looking-glass over my face. Who knows but I may take a glimpse at
myself and see whether all’s right?”
“Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments,” murmured the
stranger-youth. “I wonder how mariners feel when the ship is sinking
and they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in the
ocean, that wide and nameless sepulchre?”
For a moment the old woman’s ghastly conception so engrossed the minds
of her hearers that a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar
of a blast, had grown broad, deep and terrible before the fated group
were conscious of it. The house and all within it trembled; the
foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound
were the peal of the last trump. Young and old exchanged one wild
glance and remained an instant pale, affrighted, without utterance or
power to move. Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all their
lips:
“The slide! The slide!”
The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable
horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage and
sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot, where, in contemplation
of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! they had
quitted their security and fled right into the pathway of destruction.
Down came the whole side of the mountain in a cataract of ruin. Just
before it reached the house the stream broke into two branches,
shivered not a window there, but overwhelmed the whole vicinity,
blocked up the road and annihilated everything in its dreadful course.
Long ere the thunder of that great slide had ceased to roar among the
mountains the mortal agony had been endured and the victims were at
peace. Their bodies were never found.
The next morning the light smoke was seen stealing from the cottage
chimney up the mountain-side. Within, the fire was yet smouldering on
the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants
had but gone forth to view the devastation of the slide and would
shortly return to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape. All had
left separate tokens by which those who had known the family were made
to shed a tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has
been told far and wide, and will for ever be a legend of these
mountains. Poets have sung their fate.
There were circumstances which led some to suppose that a stranger had
been received into the cottage on this awful night, and had shared the
catastrophe of all its inmates; others denied that there were
sufficient grounds for such a conjecture. Woe for the high-souled youth
with his dream of earthly immortality! His name and person utterly
unknown, his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never to be
solved, his death and his existence equally a doubt,—whose was the
agony of that death-moment?