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.