It lies not far from Woedolor Mountain in New England. Turning to the
east, right out from among bright farms and sunny meadows, nodding in
early June with odorous grasses, you enter ascendingly among bleak
hills. These gradually close in upon a dusky pass, which, from the
violent Gulf Stream of air unceasingly driving between its cloven walls
of haggard rock, as well as from the tradition of a crazy spinster’s hut
having long ago stood somewhere hereabouts, is called the Mad Maid’s
Bellows’-pipe.
Winding along at the bottom of the gorge is a dangerously narrow
wheel-road, occupying the bed of a former torrent. Following this road
to its highest point, you stand as within a Dantean gateway. From the
steepness of the walls here, their strangely ebon hue, and the sudden
contraction of the gorge, this particular point is called the Black
Notch. The ravine now expandingly descends into a great, purple,
hopper-shaped hollow, far sunk among many Plutonian, shaggy-wooded
mountains. By the country people this hollow is called the Devil’s
Dungeon. Sounds of torrents fall on all sides upon the ear. These rapid
waters unite at last in one turbid brick-coloured stream, boiling
through a flume among enormous boulders. They call this strange-coloured
torrent Blood River. Gaining a dark precipice it wheels suddenly to the
west, and makes one maniac spring of sixty feet into the arms of a
stunted wood of gray-haired pines, between which it thence eddies on its
further way down to the invisible lowlands.
Conspicuously crowning a rocky bluff high to one side, at the cataract’s
verge, is the ruin of an old saw-mill, built in those primitive times
when vast pines and hemlocks superabounded throughout the neighbouring
region. The black-mossed bulk of those immense, rough-hewn, and
spike-knotted logs, here and there tumbled all together, in long
abandonment and decay, or left in solitary, perilous projection over the
cataract’s gloomy brink, impart to this rude wooden ruin not only much
of the aspect of one of rough-quarried stone, but also a sort of feudal,
Rhineland and Thurmberg look, derived from the pinnacled wildness of the
neighbouring scenery.
Not far from the bottom of the Dungeon stands a large whitewashed
building, relieved, like some great whited sepulchre, against the sullen
background of mountain-side firs, and other hardy evergreens,
inaccessibly rising in grim terraces for some two thousand feet.
The building is a paper-mill.
Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman’s business (so
extensively and broadcast, indeed, that at length my seeds were
distributed through all the Eastern and Northern States, and even fell
into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas), the demand for paper
at my place became so great, that the expenditure soon amounted to a
most important item in the general account. It need hardly be hinted how
paper comes into use with seedsmen, as envelopes. These are mostly made
of yellowish paper, folded square; and when filled, are all but flat,
and being stamped, and superscribed with the nature of the seeds
contained, assume not a little the appearance of business letters ready
for the mail. Of these small envelopes I used an incredible
quantity--several hundreds of thousands in a year. For a time I had
purchased my paper from the wholesale dealers in a neighbouring town.
For economy’s sake, and partly for the adventure of the trip, I now
resolved to cross the mountains, some sixty miles, and order my future
paper at the Devil’s Dungeon paper-mill.
The sleighing being uncommonly fine toward the end of January, and
promising to hold so for no small period, in spite of the bitter cold I
started one gray Friday noon in my pung, well fitted with buffalo and
wolf robes; and, spending one night on the road, next noon came in sight
of Woedolor Mountain.
The far summit fairly smoked with frost; white vapours curled up from
its white-wooded top, as from a chimney. The intense congelation made
the whole country look like one petrifaction. The steel shoes of my pung
craunched and gritted over the vitreous, chippy snow, as if it had been
broken glass. The forests here and there skirting the route, feeling the
same all-stiffening influence, their inmost fibres penetrated with the
cold, strangely groaned--not in the swaying branches merely, but
likewise in the vertical trunk--as the fitful gusts remorselessly swept
through them. Brittle with excessive frost, many colossal tough-grained
maples, snapped in twain like pipe-stems, cumbered the unfeeling earth.
Flaked all over with frozen sweat, white as a milky ram, his nostrils at
each breath sending forth two horn-shaped shoots of heated respiration,
Black, my good horse, but six years old, started at a sudden turn,
where, right across the track--not ten minutes fallen--an old distorted
hemlock lay, darkly undulatory as an anaconda.
Gaining the Bellows’-pipe, the violent blast, dead from behind, all but
shoved my high-backed pung uphill. The gust shrieked through the
shivered pass, as if laden with lost spirits bound to the unhappy world.
Ere gaining the summit, Black, my horse, as if exasperated by the
cutting wind, slung out with his strong hind-legs, tore the light pung
straight uphill, and sweeping grazingly through the narrow notch, sped
downward madly past the ruined saw-mill. Into the Devil’s Dungeon horse
and cataract rushed together.
With might and main, quitting my seat and robes, and standing backward,
with one foot braced against the dash-board, I rasped and churned the
bit, and stopped him just in time to avoid collision, at a turn, with
the bleak nozzle of a rock, couchant like a lion in the way--a roadside
rock.
At first I could not discover the paper-mill.
The whole hollow gleamed with the white, except, here and there, where a
pinnacle of granite showed one wind-swept angle bare. The mountains
stood pinned in shrouds--a pass of Alpine corpses. Where stands the
mill? Suddenly a whirling, humming sound broke upon my ear. I looked,
and there, like an arrested avalanche, lay the large whitewashed
factory. It was subordinately surrounded by a cluster of other and
smaller buildings, some of which, from their cheap, blank air, great
length, gregarious windows, and comfortless expression, no doubt were
boarding-houses of the operatives. A snow-white hamlet amidst the snows.
Various rude, irregular squares and courts resulted from the somewhat
picturesque clusterings of these buildings, owing to the broken, rocky
nature of the ground, which forbade all method in their relative
arrangement. Several narrow lanes and alleys, too, partly blocked with
snow fallen from the roof, cut up the hamlet in all directions.
When, turning from the travelled highway, jingling with bells of
numerous farmers--who, availing themselves of the fine sleighing, were
dragging their wood to market--and frequently diversified with swift
cutters dashing from inn to inn of the scattered villages--when, I say,
turning from that bustling main-road, I by degrees wound into the Mad
Maid’s Bellows’-pipe, and saw the grim Black Notch beyond, then
something latent, as well as something obvious in the time and scene,
strangely brought back to my mind my first sight of dark and grimy
Temple Bar. And when Black, my horse, went darting through the Notch,
perilously grazing its rocky wall, I remembered being in a runaway
London omnibus, which in much the same sort of style, though by no means
at an equal rate, dashed through the ancient arch of Wren. Though the
two objects did by no means completely correspond, yet this partial
inadequacy but served to tinge the similitude not less with the
vividness than the disorder of a dream. So that, when upon reining up at
the protruding rock I at last caught sight of the quaint groupings of
the factory-buildings, and with the travelled highway and the Notch
behind, found myself all alone, silently and privily stealing through
deep-cloven passages into this sequestered spot, and saw the long,
high-gabled main factory edifice, with a rude tower--for hoisting heavy
boxes--at one end, standing among its crowded outbuildings and
boarding-houses, as the Temple Church amidst the surrounding offices and
dormitories, and when the marvellous retirement of this mysterious
mountain nook fastened its whole spell upon me, then, what memory
lacked, all tributary imagination furnished, and I said to myself, ‘This
is the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon,
and frost-painted to a sepulchre.’
Dismounting, and warily picking my way down the dangerous
declivity--horse and man both sliding now and then upon the icy
ledges--at length I drove, or the blast drove me, into the largest
square, before one side of the main edifice. Piercingly and shrilly the
shotted blast blew by the corner; and redly and demoniacally boiled
Blood River at one side. A long wood-pile, of many scores of cords, all
glittering in mail of crusted ice, stood crosswise in the square. A row
of horse-posts, their north sides plastered with adhesive snow, flanked
the factory wall. The bleak frost packed and paved the square as with
some ringing metal.
The inverted similitude recurred--‘The sweet, tranquil Temple garden,
with the Thames bordering its green beds,’ strangely meditated I.
But where are the gay bachelors?
Then, as I and my horse stood shivering in the wind-spray, a girl ran
from a neighbouring dormitory door, and throwing her thin apron over her
bare head, made for the opposite building.
‘One moment, my girl; is there no shed hereabouts which I may drive
into?’
Pausing, she turned upon me a face pale with work, and blue with cold;
an eye supernatural with unrelated misery.
‘Nay,’ faltered I, ‘I mistook you. Go on; I want nothing.’
Leading my horse close to the door from which she had come, I knocked.
Another pale, blue girl appeared, shivering in the doorway as, to
prevent the blast, she jealously held the door ajar.
‘Nay, I mistake again. In God’s name shut the door. But hold, is there
no man about?’
That moment a dark-complexioned, well-wrapped personage passed, making
for the factory door, and spying him coming, the girl rapidly closed the
other one.
‘Is there no horse-shed here, sir?’
‘Yonder, the wood-shed,’ he replied, and disappeared inside the factory.
With much ado I managed to wedge in horse and pung between the scattered
piles of wood all sawn and split. Then, blanketing my horse, and piling
my buffalo on the blanket’s top, and tucking in its edges well around
the breast-band and breeching, so that the wind might not strip him
bare, I tied him fast, and ran lamely for the factory door, stiff with
frost, and cumbered with my driver’s dreadnaught.
Immediately I found myself standing in a spacious place, intolerably
lighted by long rows of windows, focusing inward the snowy scene
without.
At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with
blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank
paper.
In one corner stood some huge frame of ponderous iron, with a vertical
thing like a piston periodically rising and falling upon a heavy wooden
block. Before it--its tame minister--stood a tall girl, feeding the iron
animal with half-quires of rose-hued note-paper, which, at every
downward dab of the piston-like machine, received in the corner the
impress of a wreath of roses. I looked from the rosy paper to the pallid
cheek, but said nothing.
Seated before a long apparatus, strung with long, slender strings like
any harp, another girl was feeding it with foolscap sheets, which, so
soon as they curiously travelled from her on the cords, were withdrawn
at the opposite end of the machine by a second girl. They came to the
first girl blank; they went to the second girl ruled.
I looked upon the first girl’s brow, and saw it was young and fair; I
looked upon the second girl’s brow, and saw it was ruled and wrinkled.
Then, as I still looked, the two--for some small variety to the
monotony--changed places; and where had stood the young, fair brow, now
stood the ruled and wrinkled one.
Perched high upon a narrow platform, and still higher upon a high stool
crowning it, sat another figure serving some other iron animal; while
below the platform sat her mate in some sort of reciprocal attendance.
Not a syllable was breathed. Nothing was heard but the low, steady,
overruling hum of the iron animals. The human voice was banished from
the spot. Machinery--that vaunted slave of humanity--here stood menially
served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave
serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to
the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels.
All this scene around me was instantaneously taken in at one sweeping
glance--even before I had proceeded to unwind the heavy fur tippet from
around my neck. But as soon as this fell from me the dark-complexioned
man, standing close by, raised a sudden cry, and seizing my arm, dragged
me out into the open air, and without pausing for a word instantly
caught up some congealed snow and began rubbing both my cheeks.
‘Two white spots like the whites of your eyes,’ he said; ‘man, your
cheeks are frozen.’
‘That may well be,’ muttered I; ‘’tis some wonder the frost of the
Devil’s Dungeon strikes in no deeper. Rub away.’
Soon a horrible, tearing pain caught at my reviving cheeks. Two gaunt
blood-hounds, one on each side, seemed mumbling them. I seemed Actaeon.
Presently, when all was over, I re-entered the factory, made known my
business, concluded it satisfactorily, and then begged to be conducted
throughout the place to view it.
‘Cupid is the boy for that,’ said the dark-complexioned man. ‘Cupid!’
and by this odd fancy-name calling a dimpled, red-cheeked,
spirited-looking, forward little fellow, who was rather impudently, I
thought, gliding about among the passive-looking girls--like a gold-fish
through hueless waves--yet doing nothing in particular that I could see,
the man bade him lead the stranger through the edifice.
‘Come first and see the water-wheel,’ said this lively lad, with the air
of boyishly-brisk importance.
Quitting the folding-room, we crossed some damp, cold boards, and stood
beneath a great wet shed, incessantly showering with foam, like the
green barnacled bow of some East Indiaman in a gale. Round and round
here went the enormous revolutions of the dark colossal water-wheel,
grim with its one immutable purpose.
‘This sets our whole machinery a-going, sir; in every part of all these
buildings; where the girls work and all.’
I looked, and saw that the turbid waters of Blood River had not changed
their hue by coming under the use of man.
‘You make only blank paper; no printing of any sort, I suppose? All
blank paper, don’t you?’
‘Certainly; what else should a paper-factory make?’
The lad here looked at me as if suspicious of my common-sense.
‘Oh, to be sure!’ said I, confused and stammering; ‘it only struck me as
so strange that red waters should turn out pale chee--paper, I mean.’
He took me up a wet and rickety stair to a great light room, furnished
with no visible thing but rude, manger-like receptacles running all
round its sides; and up to these mangers, like so many mares haltered to
the rack, stood rows of girls. Before each was vertically thrust up a
long, glittering scythe, immovably fixed at bottom to the manger-edge.
The curve of the scythe, and its having no snath to it, made it look
exactly like a sword. To and fro, across the sharp edge, the girls
forever dragged long strips of rags, washed white, picked from baskets
at one side; thus ripping asunder every seam, and converting the tatters
almost into lint. The air swam with the fine, poisonous particles, which
from all sides darted, subtilely, as motes in sunbeams, into the lungs.
‘This is the rag-room,’ coughed the boy.
‘You find it rather stifling here,’ coughed I, in answer; ‘but the girls
don’t cough.’
‘Oh, they are used to it.’
‘Where do you get such hosts of rags?’ picking up a handful from a
basket.
‘Some from the country round about; some from far over sea--Leghorn and
London.’
‘’Tis not unlikely, then,’ murmured I, ‘that among these heaps of rags
there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the
Paradise of Bachelors. But the buttons are all dropped off. Pray, my
lad, do you ever find any bachelor’s buttons hereabouts?’
‘None grow in this part of the country. The Devil’s Dungeon is no place
for flowers.’
‘Oh! you mean the _flowers_ so called--the Bachelor’s Buttons?’
‘And was not that what you asked about? Or did you mean the gold
bosom-buttons of our boss, Old Bach, as our whispering girls all call
him?’
‘The man, then, I saw below is a bachelor, is he?’
‘Oh yes, he’s a Bach.’
‘The edges of those swords, they are turned outward from the girls, if I
see right; but their rags and fingers fly so, I cannot distinctly see.’
‘Turned outward.’
Yes, murmured I to myself; I see it now; turned outward; and each
erected sword is so borne, edge outward, before each girl. If my reading
fails me not, just so, of old, condemned state-prisoners went from the
hall of judgment to their doom: an officer before, bearing a sword, its
edge turned outward, in significance of their fatal sentence. So,
through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white
girls to death.
‘Those scythes look very sharp,’ again turning toward the boy.
‘Yes; they have to keep them so. Look!’
That moment two of the girls, dropping their rags, plied each a
whetstone up and down the sword-blade. My unaccustomed blood curdled at
the sharp shriek of the tormented steel.
Their own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay
them, meditated I.
‘What makes those girls so sheet-white, my lad?’
‘Why’--with a roguish twinkle, pure ignorant drollery, not-knowing
heartlessness--‘I suppose the handling of such white bits of sheets all
the time makes them so sheety.’
‘Let us leave the rag-room now, my lad.’
More tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight,
human or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of
cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy.
‘And now,’ said he, cheerily, ‘I suppose you want to see our great
machine, which cost us twelve thousand dollars only last autumn. That’s
the machine that makes the paper, too. This way, sir.’
Following him, I crossed a large, bespattered place, with two great
round vats in it, full of a white, wet, woolly-looking stuff, not unlike
the albuminous part of an egg, soft-boiled.
‘There,’ said Cupid, tapping the vats carelessly, ‘these are the first
beginnings of the paper; this white pulp you see. Look how it swims
bubbling round and round, moved by the paddle here. From hence it pours
from both vats into that one common channel yonder; and so goes, mixed
up and leisurely, to the great machine. And now for that.’
He led me into a room, stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal
heat, as if here, true enough, were being finally developed the
germinous particles lately seen.
Before me, rolled out like some long Eastern manuscript, lay stretched
one continuous length of iron framework--multitudinous and mystical,
with all sorts of rollers, wheels, and cylinders, in slowly-measured and
unceasing motion.
‘Here first comes the pulp now,’ said Cupid, pointing to the nighest end
of the machine. ‘See; first it pours out and spreads itself upon this
wide, sloping board; and then--look--slides, thin and quivering, beneath
the first roller there. Follow on now, and see it as it slides from
under that to the next cylinder. There; see how it has become just a
very little less pulpy now. One step more, and it grows still more to
some slight consistence. Still another cylinder, and it is so
knitted--though as yet mere dragon-fly wing--that it forms an air-bridge
here, like a suspended cobweb, between two more separated rollers; and
flowing over the last one, and under again, and doubling about there out
of sight for a minute among all those mixed cylinders you indistinctly
see, it reappears here, looking now at last a little less like pulp and
more like paper, but still quite delicate and defective yet awhile.
But--a little further onward, sir, if you please--here now, at this
further point, it puts on something of a real look, as if it might turn
out to be something you might possibly handle in the end. But it’s not
yet done, sir. Good way to travel yet, and plenty more of cylinders must
roll it.’
‘Bless my soul!’ said I, amazed at the elongation, interminable
convolutions, and deliberate slowness of the machine; ‘it must take a
long time for the pulp to pass from end to end, and come out paper.’
‘Oh! not so long,’ smiled the precocious lad, with a superior and
patronising air; ‘only nine minutes. But look; you may try it for
yourself. Have you a bit of paper? Ah! here’s a bit on the floor. Now
mark that with any word you please, and let me dab it on here, and we’ll
see how long before it comes out at the other end.’
‘Well, let me see,’ said I, taking out my pencil; ‘come, I’ll mark it
with your name.’
Bidding me take out my watch, Cupid adroitly dropped the inscribed slip
on an exposed part of the incipient mass.
Instantly my eye marked the second-hand on my dial-plate.
Slowly I followed the slip, inch by inch; sometimes pausing for full
half a minute as it disappeared beneath inscrutable groups of the lower
cylinders, but only gradually to emerge again; and so, on, and on, and
on--inch by inch; now in open sight, sliding along like a freckle on the
quivering sheet; and then again wholly vanished; and so, on, and on, and
on--inch by inch; all the time the main sheet growing more and more to
final firmness--when, suddenly, I saw a sort of paper-fall, not wholly
unlike a water-fall; a scissory sound smote my ear, as of some cord
being snapped; and down dropped an unfolded sheet of perfect foolscap,
with my ‘Cupid’ half faded out of it, and still moist and warm.
My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine.
‘Well, how long was it?’ said Cupid.
‘Nine minutes to a second,’ replied I, watch in hand.
‘I told you so.’
For a moment a curious emotion filled me, not wholly unlike that which
one might experience at the fulfilment of some mysterious prophecy. But
how absurd, thought I again; the thing is a mere machine, the essence of
which is unvarying punctuality and precision.
Previously absorbed by the wheels and cylinders, my attention was now
directed to a sad-looking woman standing by.
‘That is rather an elderly person so silently tending the machine-end
here. She would not seem wholly used to it either.’
‘Oh,’ knowingly whispered Cupid, through the din, ‘she only came last
week. She was a nurse formerly. But the business is poor in these parts,
and she’s left it. But look at the paper she is piling there.’
‘Ay, foolscap,’ handling the piles of moist, warm sheets, which
continually were being delivered into the woman’s waiting hands. ‘Don’t
you turn out anything but foolscap at this machine?’
‘Oh, sometimes, but not often, we turn out finer work--cream-laid and
royal sheets, we call them. But foolscap being in chief demand, we turn
out foolscap most.’
It was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping,
dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses
to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of
writings would be writ on those now vacant things--sermons, lawyers’
briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates,
bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on,
without end. Then, recurring back to them as they here lay all blank, I
could not but bethink me of that celebrated comparison of John Locke,
who, in demonstration of his theory that man had no innate ideas,
compared the human mind at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something
destined to be scribbled on, but what sort of characters no soul might
tell.
Pacing slowly to and fro along the involved machine, still humming with
its play, I was struck as well by the inevitability as the
evolvement-power in all its motions.
‘Does that thin cobweb there,’ said I, pointing to the sheet in its more
imperfect stage, ‘does that never tear or break? It is marvellous
fragile, and yet this machine it passes through is so mighty.’
‘It never is known to tear a hair’s point.’
‘Does it never stop--get clogged?’
‘No. It _must_ go. The machinery makes it go just _so_; just that very
way, and at that very pace you there plainly _see_ it go. The pulp can’t
help going.’
Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron
animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate
sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some
living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so
specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging
fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow
the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or
entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points
where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the
autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood
spellbound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes--there, passing in
slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to
the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the
pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully,
beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly
outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on
the handkerchief of Saint Veronica.
‘Halloa! the heat of the room is too much for you,’ cried Cupid, staring
at me.
‘No--I am rather chill, if anything.’
‘Come out, sir--out--out,’ and, with the protecting air of a careful
father, the precocious lad hurried me outside.
In a few moments, feeling revived a little, I went into the
folding-room--the first room I had entered, and where the desk for
transacting business stood, surrounded by the blank counters and blank
girls engaged at them.
‘Cupid here has led me a strange tour,’ said I to the dark-complexioned
man before mentioned, whom I had ere this discovered not only to be an
old bachelor, but also the principal proprietor. ‘Yours is a most
wonderful factory. Your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable
intricacy.’
‘Yes, all our visitors think it so. But we don’t have many. We are in a
very out-of-the-way corner here. Few inhabitants, too. Most of our girls
come from far-off villages.’
‘The girls,’ echoed I, glancing round at their silent forms. ‘Why is it,
sir, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are
indiscriminately called girls, never women?’
‘Oh! as to that--why, I suppose, the fact of their being generally
unmarried--that’s the reason, I should think. But it never struck me
before. For our factory here, we will not have married women; they are
apt to be off-and-on too much. We want none but steady workers: twelve
hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and
sixty-five days, excepting Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Fast-days. That’s
our rule. And so, having no married women, what females we have are
rightly enough called girls.’
‘Then these are all maids,’ said I, while some pained homage to their
pale virginity made me involuntarily bow.
‘All maids.’
Again the strange emotion filled me.
‘Your cheeks look whitish yet, sir,’ said the man, gazing at me
narrowly. ‘You must be careful going home. Do they pain you at all now?
It’s a bad sign, if they do.’
‘No doubt, sir,’ answered I, ‘when once I have got out of the Devil’s
Dungeon, I shall feel them mending.’
‘Ah, yes; the winter air in valleys, or gorges, or any sunken place, is
far colder and more bitter than elsewhere. You would hardly believe it
now, but it is colder here than at the top of Woedolor Mountain.’
‘I dare say it is, sir. But time presses me; I must depart.’
With that, remuffling myself in dreadnaught and tippet, thrusting my
hands into my huge sealskin mittens, I sallied out into the nipping air,
and found poor Black, my horse, all cringing and doubled up with the
cold.
Soon, wrapped in furs and meditations, I ascended from the Devil’s
Dungeon.
At the Black Notch I paused, and once more bethought me of Temple Bar.
Then, shooting through the pass, all alone with inscrutable nature, I
exclaimed--Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!
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