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 tonight; 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 tomorrow, 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 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, tonight,’ 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.’
‘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 the 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 CARBUNCLE
A MYSTERY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS
(The Indian tradition, on which this somewhat extravagant tale is
founded, is both too wild and too beautiful to be adequately wrought
up in prose. Sullivan, in his History of Maine, written since the
Revolution, remarks, that even then the existence of the Great Carbuncle
was not entirely discredited.)
AT nightfall, once in the olden time, on the rugged side of one of the
Crystal Hills, a party of adventurers were refreshing themselves, after
a toilsome and fruitless quest for the Great Carbuncle. They had come
thither, not as friends nor partners in the enterprise, but each, save
one youthful pair, impelled by his own selfish and solitary longing for
this wondrous gem. Their feeling of brotherhood, however, was strong
enough to induce them to contribute a mutual aid in building a rude
hut of branches, and kindling a great fire of shattered pines, that had
drifted down the headlong current of the Amonoosuck, on the lower bank
of which they were to pass the night. There was but one of their number,
perhaps, who had become so estranged from natural sympathies, by the
absorbing spell of the pursuit, as to acknowledge no satisfaction at the
sight of human faces, in the remote and solitary region whither they had
ascended. A vast extent of wilderness lay between them and the nearest
settlement, while scant a mile above their heads was that black verge
where the hills throw off their shaggy mantle of forest trees, and
either robe themselves in clouds or tower naked into the sky. The roar
of the Amonoosuck would have been too awful for endurance if only a
solitary man had listened, while the mountain stream talked with the
wind.
The adventurers, therefore, exchanged hospitable greetings, and welcomed
one another to the hut, where each man was the host, and all were the
guests of the whole company. They spread their individual supplies of
food on the flat surface of a rock, and partook of a general repast; at
the close of which, a sentiment of good fellowship was perceptible among
the party, though repressed by the idea, that the renewed search for the
Great Carbuncle must make them strangers again in the morning. Seven men
and one young woman, they warmed themselves together at the fire, which
extended its bright wall along the whole front of their wigwam. As they
observed the various and contrasted figures that made up the assemblage,
each man looking like a caricature of himself, in the unsteady light
that flickered over him, they came mutually to the conclusion, that
an odder society had never met, in city or wilderness, on mountain or
plain.
The eldest of the group, a tall, lean, weather-beaten man, some sixty
years of age, was clad in the skins of wild animals, whose fashion of
dress he did well to imitate, since the deer, the wolf, and the
bear, had long been his most intimate companions. He was one of those
ill-fated mortals, such as the Indians told of, whom, in their early
youth, the Great Carbuncle smote with a peculiar madness, and became the
passionate dream of their existence. All who visited that region knew
him as the Seeker and by no other name. As none could remember when he
first took up the search, there went a fable in the valley of the Saco,
that for his inordinate lust after the Great Carbuncle, he had been
condemned to wander among the mountains till the end of time, still with
the same feverish hopes at sunrise--the same despair at eve. Near this
miserable Seeker sat a little elderly personage, wearing a high-crowned
hat, shaped somewhat like a crucible. He was from beyond the sea, a
Doctor Cacaphodel, who had wilted and dried himself into a mummy by
continually stooping over charcoal furnaces, and inhaling unwholesome
fumes during his researches in chemistry and alchemy. It was told of
him, whether truly or not, that, at the commencement of his studies, he
had drained his body of all its richest blood, and wasted it, with other
inestimable ingredients, in an unsuccessful experiment--and had never
been a well man since. Another of the adventurers was Master bod
Pigsnort, a weighty merchant and selector Boston, and an elder of the
famous Mr. Norton’s church. His enemies had a ridiculous story that
Master Pigsnort was accustomed to spend a whole hour after prayer time,
every morning and evening, in wallowing naked among an immense quantity
of pine-tree shillings, which were the earliest silver coinage of
Massachusetts. The fourth whom we shall notice had no name that his
companions knew of, and was chiefly distinguished by a sneer that always
contorted his thin visage, and by a prodigious pair of spectacles, which
were supposed to deform and discolor the whole face of nature, to this
gentleman’s perception. The fifth adventurer likewise lacked a name,
which was the greater pity, as he appeared to be a poet. He was a
bright-eyed man, but woefully pined away, which was no more than
natural, if, as some people affirmed, his ordinary diet was fog, morning
mist, and a slice of the densest cloud within his reach, sauced with
moonshine, whenever he could get it. Certain it is, that the poetry
which flowed from him had a smack of all these dainties. The sixth of
the party was a young man of haughty mien, and sat somewhat apart from
the rest, wearing his plumed hat loftily among his elders, while the
fire glittered on the rich embroidery of his dress and gleamed intensely
on the jewelled pommel of his sword. This was the Lord de Vere, who,
when at home, was said to spend much of his time in the burial vault of
his dead progenitors, rummaging their mouldy coffins in search of all
the earthly pride and vainglory that was hidden among bones and dust;
so that, besides his own share, he had the collected haughtiness of his
whole line of ancestry.
Lastly, there was a handsome youth in rustic garb, and by his side a
blooming little person, in whom a delicate shade of maiden reserve was
just melting into the rich glow of a young wife’s affection. Her name
was Hannah, and her husband’s Matthew; two homely names, yet well enough
adapted to the simple pair, who seemed strangely out of place among
the whimsical fraternity whose wits had been set agog by the Great
Carbuncle.
Beneath the shelter of one hut, in the bright blaze of the same fire,
sat this varied group of adventurers, all so intent upon a single
object, that, of whatever else they began to speak, their closing words
were sure to be illuminated with the Great Carbuncle. Several related
the circumstances that brought them thither. One had listened to a
traveller’s tale of this marvellous stone in his own distant country,
and had immediately been seized with such a thirst for beholding it as
could only, be quenched in its intensest lustre. Another, so long ago as
when the famous Captain Smith visited these coasts, had seen it blazing
far at sea, and had felt no rest in all the intervening years till
now that he took up the search. A third, being camped on a hunting
expedition full forty miles south of the White Mountains, awoke at
midnight, and beheld the Great Carbuncle gleaming like a meteor, so
that the shadows of the trees fell backward from it. They spoke of the
innumerable attempts which had been made to reach the spot, and of
the singular fatality which had hitherto withheld success from all
adventurers, though it might seem so easy to follow to its source a
light that overpowered the moon, and almost matched the sun. It was
observable that each smiled scornfully at the madness of every other
in anticipating better fortune than the past, yet nourished a scarcely
hidden conviction that he would himself be the favored one. As if to
allay their too sanguine hopes, they recurred to the Indian traditions
that a spirit kept watch about the gem, and bewildered those who sought
it either by removing it from peak to peak of the higher hills, or by
calling up a mist from the enchanted lake over which it hung. But these
tales were deemed unworthy of credit, all professing to believe that
the search had been baffled by want of sagacity or perseverance in
the adventurers, or such other causes as might naturally obstruct the
passage to any given point among the intricacies of forest, valley, and
mountain.
In a pause of the conversation the wearer of the prodigious spectacles
looked round upon the party, making each individual, in turn, the object
of the sneer which invariably dwelt upon his countenance.
‘So, fellow-pilgrims,’ said he, ‘here we are, seven wise men, and one
fair damsel--who, doubtless, is as wise as any graybeard of the company:
here we are, I say, all bound on the same goodly enterprise. Methinks,
now, it were not amiss that each of us declare what he proposes to do
with the Great Carbuncle, provided he have the good hap to clutch it.
What says our friend in the bear skin? How mean you, good sir, to enjoy
the prize which you have been seeking, the Lord knows how long, among
the Crystal Hills?’
‘How enjoy it!’ exclaimed the aged Seeker, bitterly. ‘I hope for no
enjoyment from it; that folly has passed long ago! I keep up the search
for this accursed stone because the vain ambition of my youth has become
a fate upon me in old age. The pursuit alone is my strength--the energy
of my soul--the warmth of my blood--and the pith and marrow of my bones!
Were I to turn my back upon it I should fall down dead on the hither
side of the Notch, which is the gateway of this mountain region. Yet not
to have my wasted lifetime back again would I give up my hopes of the
Great Carbuncle! Having found it, I shall bear it to a certain cavern
that I wot of, and there, grasping it in my arms, lie down and die, and
keep it buried with me forever.’