If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit was
wandering and uncertain, like that of most mountain-tops; but, seen from
the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the
lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion. The flanks and haunches
were vaguely distinguished from the mass; but the mighty head, resting
with its tossed mane upon the vast paws stretched before it, was boldly
sculptured against the sky. The likeness could not have been more
perfect, when you had it in profile, if it had been a definite intention
of art; and you could travel far north and far south before the illusion
vanished. In winter the head was blotted by the snows; and sometimes the
vagrant clouds caught upon it and deformed it, or hid it, at other
seasons; but commonly, after the last snow went in the spring until the
first snow came in the fall, the Lion's Head was a part of the landscape,
as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face itself.
Long after other parts of the hill country were opened to summer sojourn,
the region of Lion's Head remained almost primitively solitary and
savage. A stony mountain road followed the bed of the torrent that
brawled through the valley at its base, and at a certain point a still
rougher lane climbed from the road along the side of the opposite height
to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a
meagre acreage of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed
all the neighboring steeps. The farm-house level commanded the best view
of Lion's Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they came
on foot, or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the
Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels. The drivers of the
coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that
dripped into the green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about
the door-yard to look at the Lion's Head, to wonder at it and mock at it,
according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have felt
that they ever had a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who sold
them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of maple sugar if they were
very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to make much
of her from the first; but some of them asked her if it were not rather
lonely there, and she said that when you heard the catamounts scream at
night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem lonesome. When one
of them declared that if she should hear a catamount scream or a bear
growl she should die, the woman answered, Well, she presumed we must all
die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a covert slant in her
words, for they were spoken with the same look she wore when she told
them that the milk was five cents a glass, and the black maple sugar
three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned upon their urgence
that the gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the corners of the house was
her husband, and the three lank boys with him were her sons; that the
children whose faces watched them through the writhing window panes were
her two little girls; that the urchin who stood shyly twisted, all but
his white head and sunburned face, into her dress and glanced at them
with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and that he was three years
old. With like coldness of voice and face, she assented to their
conjecture that the space walled off in the farther corner of the orchard
was the family burial ground; and she said, with no more feeling that the
ladies could see than she had shown concerning the other facts, that the
graves they saw were those of her husband's family and of the children
she had lost there had been ten children, and she had lost four. She did
not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the sympathy which expressed
itself in curiosity as to the sickness they had died of; the ladies left
her with the belief that they had met a character, and she remained with
the conviction, briefly imparted to her husband, that they were tonguey.
The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in
the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar
would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion's Head stamped on it,
she answered that she got enough of Lion's Head without wanting to see it
on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy
of Lion's Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp out
with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her
manner remained the same. It did not change when the excursionists drove
away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter.
When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys
shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted from the granite base of Lion's
Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the
noise there was most of the time. Now and then a wagon passed on the
stony road by the brook in the valley, and sent up its clatter to the
farm-house on its high shelf, but there was scarcely another break from
the silence except when the coaching-parties came.
The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the
silence, as the red of the farm-house and the barn was like a part of the
green of the fields and woods all round them: the black-green of pines
and spruces, the yellow-green of maples and birches, dense to the tops of
the dreary hills, and breaking like a bated sea around the Lion's Head.
The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inward-curving chest, but
his wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty of figure
and a heavily moulded regularity of feature that impressed such as had
eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks. She was forty when they
began to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the reddish heaps of
her hair, like the pallor that overlies the crimson of the autumnal oak.
She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but since her marriage
at eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the children she had
lost. They were born with the taint of their father's family, and they
withered from their cradles. The youngest boy alone; of all her brood,
seemed to have inherited her health and strength. The rest as they grew
up began to cough, as she had heard her husband's brothers and sisters
cough, and then she waited in hapless patience the fulfilment of their
doom. The two little girls whose faces the ladies of the first
coaching-party saw at the farm-house windows had died away from them; two
of the lank boys had escaped, and in the perpetual exile of California
and Colorado had saved themselves alive. Their father talked of going,
too, but ten years later he still dragged himself spectrally about the
labors of the farm, with the same cough at sixty which made his oldest
son at twenty-nine look scarcely younger than himself.