the image, gazing at him, as it might seem, with the very same
expression of mirthful mischief that had been the farewell look of the
apparition when, but a moment before, she turned her face towards the
crowd. The carver stood beside his creation, mending the beautiful fan,
which by some accident was broken in her hand. But there was no longer
any motion in the life-like image, nor any real woman in the workshop,
nor even the witchcraft of a sunny shadow, that might have deluded
people's eyes as it flitted along the street. Captain Hunnewell, too,
had vanished. His hoarse, sea-breezy tones, however, were audible on the
other side of a door that opened upon the water.
"Sit down in the stern sheets, my lady," said the gallant captain.
"Come, bear a hand, you lubbers, and set us on board in the turning of a
minute-glass."
And then was heard the stroke of oars.
"Drowne," said Copley, with a smile of intelligence, "you have been a
truly fortunate man. What painter or statuary ever had such a subject!
No wonder that she inspired a genius into you, and first created the
artist who afterwards created her image."
Drowne looked at him with a visage that bore the traces of tears, but
from which the light of imagination and sensibility, so recently
illuminating it, had departed. He was again the mechanical carver that
he had been known to be all his lifetime.
"I hardly understand what you mean, Mr. Copley," said he, putting his
hand to his brow. "This image! Can it have been my work? Well, I have
wrought it in a kind of dream; and now that I am broad awake I must set
about finishing yonder figure of Admiral Vernon."
And forthwith he employed himself on the stolid countenance of one of
his wooden progeny, and completed it in his own mechanical style, from
which he was never known afterwards to deviate. He followed his business
industriously for many years, acquired a competence, and in the latter
part of his life attained to a dignified station in the church, being
remembered in records and traditions as Deacon Drowne, the carver. One
of his productions, an Indian chief, gilded all over, stood during the
better part of a century on the cupola of the Province House, bedazzling
the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of the sun. Another
work of the good deacon's hand--a reduced likeness of his friend Captain
Hunnewell, holding a telescope and quadrant--may be seen to this day, at
the corner of Broad and State Streets, serving in the useful capacity of
sign to the shop of a nautical-instrument maker. We know not how to
account for the inferiority of this quaint old figure as compared with
the recorded excellence of the Oaken Lady, unless on the supposition
that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensibility, creative
power, genius, which, according to circumstances, may either be
developed in this world, or shrouded in a mask of dulness until another
state of being. To our friend Drowne there came a brief season of
excitement, kindled by love. It rendered him a genius for that one
occasion, but quenched in disappointment, left him again the mechanical
carver in wood, without the power even of appreciating the work that his
own hands had wrought. Yet, who can doubt that the very highest state to
which a human spirit can attain, in its loftiest aspirations, is its
truest and most natural state, and that Drowne was more consistent with
himself when he wrought the admirable figure of the mysterious lady,
than when he perpetrated a whole progeny of blockheads?
There was a rumor in Boston, about this period, that a young Portuguese
lady of rank, on some occasion of political or domestic disquietude, had
fled from her home in Fayal and put herself under the protection of
Captain Hunnewell, on board of whose vessel, and at whose residence, she
was sheltered until a change of affairs. This fair stranger must have
been the original of Drowne's Wooden Image.
The Ambitious Guest
One September night, a family had gathered round their hearth, and piled
it high with the drift-wood 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 there 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 towards 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 revery, 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 round about. 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 round 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."
"O, 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 graveclothes
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 forever 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?
The Great Stone Face
One afternoon, when the sun was going down, a mother and her little boy
sat at the door of their cottage, talking about the Great Stone Face.
They had but to lift their eyes, and there it was plainly to be seen,
though miles away, with the sunshine brightening all its features.
And what was the Great Stone Face?
Embosomed amongst a family of lofty mountains, there was a valley so
spacious that it contained many thousand inhabitants. Some of these good
people dwelt in log-huts, with the black forest all around them, on the
steep and difficult hillsides. Others had their homes in comfortable
farm-houses, and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle slopes or level
surfaces of the valley. Others, again, were congregated into populous
villages, where some wild, highland rivulet, tumbling down from its
birthplace in the upper mountain region, had been caught and tamed by
human cunning, and compelled to turn the machinery of cotton-factories.
The inhabitants of this valley, in short, were numerous, and of many
modes of life. But all of them, grown people and children, had a kind of
familiarity with the Great Stone Face, although some possessed the gift
of distinguishing this grand natural phenomenon more perfectly than many
of their neighbors.
The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic
playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some
immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as,
when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of
the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan,
had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad
arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long
bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have
rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other.
True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the
outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of
ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.
Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen;
and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with
all its original divinity intact, did they appear; until, as it grew dim
in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains
clustering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed positively to be
alive.