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The snow-image, and other twice-told tales

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #513 · 439,509 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The snow-image, and other twice-told tales

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: May 1, 1996 [eBook #513]
                Most recently updated: May 22, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/513

Credits: Charles Keller


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SNOW-IMAGE, AND OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES ***




The Snow-Image

and Other Twice-Told Tales

by Nathaniel Hawthorne


Contents

 PREFACE
 The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle
 The Great Stone Face
 Main Street
 Ethan Brand
 A Bell’s Biography
 Sylph Etherege
 The Canterbury Pilgrims
 Old News
 The Man of Adamant: An Apologue
 The Devil in Manuscript
 John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving
 Old Ticonderoga: A Picture of The Past
 The Wives of The Dead
 Little Daffydowndilly
 My Kinsman, Major Molineux




PREFACE


TO HORATIO BRIDGE, ESQ., U. S. N.

MY DEAR BRIDGE:—Some of the more crabbed of my critics, I understand,
have pronounced your friend egotistical, indiscreet, and even
impertinent, on account of the Prefaces and Introductions with which,
on several occasions, he has seen fit to pave the reader’s way into the
interior edifice of a book. In the justice of this censure I do not
exactly concur, for the reasons, on the one hand, that the public
generally has negatived the idea of undue freedom on the author’s part,
by evincing, it seems to me, rather more interest in those aforesaid
Introductions than in the stories which followed; and that, on the
other hand, with whatever appearance of confidential intimacy, I have
been especially careful to make no disclosures respecting myself which
the most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and
which I was not perfectly willing that my worst enemy should know. I
might further justify myself, on the plea that, ever since my youth, I
have been addressing a very limited circle of friendly readers, without
much danger of being overheard by the public at large; and that the
habits thus acquired might pardonably continue, although strangers may
have begun to mingle with my audience.

But the charge, I am bold to say, is not a reasonable one, in any view
which we can fairly take of it. There is no harm, but, on the contrary,
good, in arraying some of the ordinary facts of life in a slightly
idealized and artistic guise. I have taken facts which relate to
myself, because they chance to be nearest at hand, and likewise are my
own property. And, as for egotism, a person, who has been burrowing, to
his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature, for the
purposes of psychological romance,—and who pursues his researches in
that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as
by the light of observation,—will smile at incurring such an imputation
in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits, his
abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the
surface. These things hide the man, instead of displaying him. You must
make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of
his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his
essential traits.

Be all this as it may, there can be no question as to the propriety of
my inscribing this volume of earlier and later sketches to you, and
pausing here, a few moments, to speak of them, as friend speaks to
friend; still being cautious, however, that the public and the critics
shall overhear nothing which we care about concealing. On you, if on no
other person, I am entitled to rely, to sustain the position of my
Dedicatee. If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an
author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but, while
we were lads together at a country college,—gathering blueberries, in
study-hours, under those tall academic pines; or watching the great
logs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or
shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the
summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy little stream
which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the
forest,—though you and I will never cast a line in it again,—two idle
lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a
hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the
worse for us,—still it was your prognostic of your friend’s destiny,
that he was to be a writer of fiction.

And a fiction-monger, in due season, he became. But was there ever such
a weary delay in obtaining the slightest recognition from the public,
as in my case? I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under
enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew
to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared
possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity. And there,
perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment, with the moss on the
imprisoning tree-trunks, and the yellow leaves of more than a score of
autumns piled above me, if it had not been for you. For it was through
your interposition—and that, moreover, unknown to himself—that your
early friend was brought before the public, somewhat more prominently
than theretofore, in the first volume of Twice-told Tales. Not a
publisher in America, I presume, would have thought well enough of my
forgotten or never-noticed stories to risk the expense of print and
paper; nor do I say this with any purpose of casting odium on the
respectable fraternity of booksellers, for their blindness to my
wonderful merit. To confess the truth, I doubted of the public
recognition quite as much as they could do. So much the more generous
was your confidence; and knowing, as I do, that it was founded on old
friendship rather than cold criticism, I value it only the more for
that.

So, now, when I turn back upon my path, lighted by a transitory gleam
of public favor, to pick up a few articles which were left out of my
former collections, I take pleasure in making them the memorial of our
very long and unbroken connection. Some of these sketches were among
the earliest that I wrote, and, after lying for years in manuscript,
they at last skulked into the Annuals or Magazines, and have hidden
themselves there ever since. Others were the productions of a later
period; others, again, were written recently. The comparison of these
various trifles—the indices of intellectual condition at far separate
epochs—affects me with a singular complexity of regrets. I am disposed
to quarrel with the earlier sketches, both because a mature judgment
discerns so many faults, and still more because they come so nearly up
to the standard of the best that I can achieve now. The ripened
autumnal fruit tastes but little better than the early windfalls. It
would, indeed, be mortifying to believe that the summer-time of life
has passed away, without any greater progress and improvement than is
indicated here. But—at least, so I would fain hope—these things are
scarcely to be depended upon, as measures of the intellectual and moral
man. In youth, men are apt to write more wisely than they really know
or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing
and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.
The truth that was only in the fancy then may have since become a
substance in the mind and heart.

I have nothing further, I think, to say; unless it be that the public
need not dread my again trespassing on its kindness, with any more of
these musty and mouse-nibbled leaves of old periodicals, transformed,
by the magic arts of my friendly publishers, into a new book. These are
the last. Or, if a few still remain, they are either such as no
paternal partiality could induce the author to think worth preserving,
or else they have got into some very dark and dusty hiding-place, quite
out of my own remembrance and whence no researches can avail to unearth
them. So there let them rest.

                        Very sincerely yours,
                                                   N. H.


LENOX, November 1, 1851.




THE SNOW-IMAGE:
A CHILDISH MIRACLE


One afternoon of a cold winter’s day, when the sun shone forth with
chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of
their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder
child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest
disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and
other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her
brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the
ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody
think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father of these two
children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is important to say, was an
excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of man, a dealer in
hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is called the
common-sense view of all matters that came under his consideration.
With a heart about as tender as other people’s, he had a head as hard
and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron
pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother’s
character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of
unworldly beauty,—a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had
survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid
the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.

So, Violet and Peony, as I began with saying, besought their mother to
let them run out and play in the new snow; for, though it had looked so
dreary and dismal, drifting downward out of the gray sky, it had a very
cheerful aspect, now that the sun was shining on it. The children dwelt
in a city, and had no wider play-place than a little garden before the
house, divided by a white fence from the street, and with a pear-tree
and two or three plum-trees overshadowing it, and some rose-bushes just
in front of the parlor-windows. The trees and shrubs, however, were now
leafless, and their twigs were enveloped in the light snow, which thus
made a kind of wintry foliage, with here and there a pendent icicle for
the fruit.

“Yes, Violet,—yes, my little Peony,” said their kind mother, “you may
go out and play in the new snow.”

Accordingly, the good lady bundled up her darlings in woollen jackets
and wadded sacks, and put comforters round their necks, and a pair of
striped gaiters on each little pair of legs, and worsted mittens on
their hands, and gave them a kiss apiece, by way of a spell to keep
away Jack Frost. Forth sallied the two children, with a
hop-skip-and-jump, that carried them at once into the very heart of a
huge snow-drift, whence Violet emerged like a snow-bunting, while
little Peony floundered out with his round face in full bloom. Then
what a merry time had they! To look at them, frolicking in the wintry
garden, you would have thought that the dark and pitiless storm had
been sent for no other purpose but to provide a new plaything for
Violet and Peony; and that they themselves had been created, as the
snow-birds were, to take delight only in the tempest, and in the white
mantle which it spread over the earth.

At last, when they had frosted one another all over with handfuls of
snow, Violet, after laughing heartily at little Peony’s figure, was
struck with a new idea.

“You look exactly like a snow-image, Peony,” said she, “if your cheeks
were not so red. And that puts me in mind! Let us make an image out of
snow,—an image of a little girl,—and it shall be our sister, and shall
run about and play with us all winter long. Won’t it be nice?”

“Oh yes!” cried Peony, as plainly as he could speak, for he was but a
little boy. “That will be nice! And mamma shall see it!”

“Yes,” answered Violet; “mamma shall see the new little girl. But she
must not make her come into the warm parlor; for, you know, our little
snow-sister will not love the warmth.”

And forthwith the children began this great business of making a
snow-image that should run about; while their mother, who was sitting
at the window and overheard some of their talk, could not help smiling
at the gravity with which they set about it. They really seemed to
imagine that there would be no difficulty whatever in creating a live
little girl out of the snow. And, to say the truth, if miracles are
ever to be wrought, it will be by putting our hands to the work in
precisely such a simple and undoubting frame of mind as that in which
Violet and Peony now undertook to perform one, without so much as
knowing that it was a miracle. So thought the mother; and thought,
likewise, that the new snow, just fallen from heaven, would be
excellent material to make new beings of, if it were not so very cold.
She gazed at the children a moment longer, delighting to watch their
little figures,—the girl, tall for her age, graceful and agile, and so
delicately colored that she looked like a cheerful thought more than a
physical reality; while Peony expanded in breadth rather than height,
and rolled along on his short and sturdy legs as substantial as an
elephant, though not quite so big. Then the mother resumed her work.
What it was I forget; but she was either trimming a silken bonnet for
Violet, or darning a pair of stockings for little Peony’s short legs.
Again, however, and again, and yet other agains, she could not help
turning her head to the window to see how the children got on with
their snow-image.

Indeed, it was an exceedingly pleasant sight, those bright little souls
at their task! Moreover, it was really wonderful to observe how
knowingly and skilfully they managed the matter. Violet assumed the
chief direction, and told Peony what to do, while, with her own
delicate fingers, she shaped out all the nicer parts of the
snow-figure. It seemed, in fact, not so much to be made by the
children, as to grow up under their hands, while they were playing and
prattling about it. Their mother was quite surprised at this; and the
longer she looked, the more and more surprised she grew.

“What remarkable children mine are!” thought she, smiling with a
mother’s pride; and, smiling at herself, too, for being so proud of
them. “What other children could have made anything so like a little
girl’s figure out of snow at the first trial? Well; but now I must
finish Peony’s new frock, for his grandfather is coming to-morrow, and
I want the little fellow to look handsome.”

So she took up the frock, and was soon as busily at work again with her
needle as the two children with their snow-image. But still, as the
needle travelled hither and thither through the seams of the dress, the
mother made her toil light and happy by listening to the airy voices of
Violet and Peony. They kept talking to one another all the time, their
tongues being quite as active as their feet and hands. Except at
intervals, she could not distinctly hear what was said, but had merely
a sweet impression that they were in a most loving mood, and were
enjoying themselves highly, and that the business of making the
snow-image went prosperously on. Now and then, however, when Violet and
Peony happened to raise their voices, the words were as audible as if
they had been spoken in the very parlor where the mother sat. Oh how
delightfully those words echoed in her heart, even though they meant
nothing so very wise or wonderful, after all!

But you must know a mother listens with her heart much more than with
her ears; and thus she is often delighted with the trills of celestial
music, when other people can hear nothing of the kind.

“Peony, Peony!” cried Violet to her brother, who had gone to another
part of the garden, “bring me some of that fresh snow, Peony, from the
very farthest corner, where we have not been trampling. I want it to
shape our little snow-sister’s bosom with. You know that part must be
quite pure, just as it came out of the sky!”

“Here it is, Violet!” answered Peony, in his bluff tone,—but a very
sweet tone, too,—as he came floundering through the half-trodden
drifts. “Here is the snow for her little bosom. O Violet, how
beau-ti-ful she begins to look!”

“Yes,” said Violet, thoughtfully and quietly; “our snow-sister does
look very lovely. I did not quite know, Peony, that we could make such
a sweet little girl as this.”

The mother, as she listened, thought how fit and delightful an incident
it would be, if fairies, or still better, if angel-children were to
come from paradise, and play invisibly with her own darlings, and help
them to make their snow-image, giving it the features of celestial
babyhood! Violet and Peony would not be aware of their immortal
playmates,—only they would see that the image grew very beautiful while
they worked at it, and would think that they themselves had done it
all.

“My little girl and boy deserve such playmates, if mortal children ever
did!” said the mother to herself; and then she smiled again at her own
motherly pride.

Nevertheless, the idea seized upon her imagination; and, ever and anon,
she took a glimpse out of the window, half dreaming that she might see
the golden-haired children of paradise sporting with her own
golden-haired Violet and bright-cheeked Peony.

Now, for a few moments, there was a busy and earnest, but indistinct
hum of the two children’s voices, as Violet and Peony wrought together
with one happy consent. Violet still seemed to be the guiding spirit,
while Peony acted rather as a laborer, and brought her the snow from
far and near. And yet the little urchin evidently had a proper
understanding of the matter, too!

“Peony, Peony!” cried Violet; for her brother was again at the other
side of the garden. “Bring me those light wreaths of snow that have
rested on the lower branches of the pear-tree. You can clamber on the
snowdrift, Peony, and reach them easily. I must have them to make some
ringlets for our snow-sister’s head!”

“Here they are, Violet!” answered the little boy. “Take care you do not
break them. Well done! Well done! How pretty!”

“Does she not look sweetly?” said Violet, with a very satisfied tone;
“and now we must have some little shining bits of ice, to make the
brightness of her eyes. She is not finished yet. Mamma will see how
very beautiful she is; but papa will say, ‘Tush! nonsense!—come in out
of the cold!’”

“Let us call mamma to look out,” said Peony; and then he shouted
lustily, “Mamma! mamma!! mamma!!! Look out, and see what a nice ’ittle
girl we are making!”

The mother put down her work for an instant, and looked out of the
window. But it so happened that the sun—for this was one of the
shortest days of the whole year—had sunken so nearly to the edge of the
world that his setting shine came obliquely into the lady’s eyes. So
she was dazzled, you must understand, and could not very distinctly
observe what was in the garden. Still, however, through all that
bright, blinding dazzle of the sun and the new snow, she beheld a small
white figure in the garden, that seemed to have a wonderful deal of
human likeness about it. And she saw Violet and Peony,—indeed, she
looked more at them than at the image,—she saw the two children still
at work; Peony bringing fresh snow, and Violet applying it to the
figure as scientifically as a sculptor adds clay to his model.
Indistinctly as she discerned the snow-child, the mother thought to
herself that never before was there a snow-figure so cunningly made,
nor ever such a dear little girl and boy to make it.

“They do everything better than other children,” said she, very
complacently. “No wonder they make better snow-images!”

She sat down again to her work, and made as much haste with it as
possible; because twilight would soon come, and Peony’s frock was not
yet finished, and grandfather was expected, by railroad, pretty early
in the morning. Faster and faster, therefore, went her flying fingers.
The children, likewise, kept busily at work in the garden, and still
the mother listened, whenever she could catch a word. She was amused to
observe how their little imaginations had got mixed up with what they
were doing, and carried away by it. They seemed positively to think
that the snow-child would run about and play with them.

“What a nice playmate she will be for us, all winter long!” said
Violet. “I hope papa will not be afraid of her giving us a cold!
Sha’n’t you love her dearly, Peony?”

“Oh yes!” cried Peony. “And I will hug her, and she shall sit down
close by me and drink some of my warm milk!”

“Oh no, Peony!” answered Violet, with grave wisdom. “That will not do
at all. Warm milk will not be wholesome for our little snow-sister.
Little snow people, like her, eat nothing but icicles. No, no, Peony;
we must not give her anything warm to drink!”

There was a minute or two of silence; for Peony, whose short legs were
never weary, had gone on a pilgrimage again to the other side of the
garden. All of a sudden, Violet cried out, loudly and joyfully,—“Look
here, Peony! Come quickly! A light has been shining on her cheek out of
that rose-colored cloud! and the color does not go away! Is not that
beautiful!”

“Yes; it is beau-ti-ful,” answered Peony, pronouncing the three
syllables with deliberate accuracy. “O Violet, only look at her hair!
It is all like gold!”

“Oh certainly,” said Violet, with tranquillity, as if it were very much
a matter of course. “That color, you know, comes from the golden
clouds, that we see up there in the sky. She is almost finished now.
But her lips must be made very red,—redder than her cheeks. Perhaps,
Peony, it will make them red if we both kiss them!”

Accordingly, the mother heard two smart little smacks, as if both her
children were kissing the snow-image on its frozen mouth. But, as this
did not seem to make the lips quite red enough, Violet next proposed
that the snow-child should be invited to kiss Peony’s scarlet cheek.

“Come, ’ittle snow-sister, kiss me!” cried Peony.

“There! she has kissed you,” added Violet, “and now her lips are very
red. And she blushed a little, too!”

“Oh, what a cold kiss!” cried Peony.

Just then, there came a breeze of the pure west-wind, sweeping through
the garden and rattling the parlor-windows. It sounded so wintry cold,
that the mother was about to tap on the window-pane with her thimbled
finger, to summon the two children in, when they both cried out to her
with one voice. The tone was not a tone of surprise, although they were
evidently a good deal excited; it appeared rather as if they were very
much rejoiced at some event that had now happened, but which they had
been looking for, and had reckoned upon all along.

“Mamma! mamma! We have finished our little snow-sister, and she is
running about the garden with us!”

“What imaginative little beings my children are!” thought the mother,
putting the last few stitches into Peony’s frock. “And it is strange,
too that they make me almost as much a child as they themselves are! I
can hardly help believing, now, that the snow-image has really come to
life!”

“Dear mamma!” cried Violet, “pray look out and see what a sweet
playmate we have!”

The mother, being thus entreated, could no longer delay to look forth
from the window. The sun was now gone out of the sky, leaving, however,
a rich inheritance of his brightness among those purple and golden
clouds which make the sunsets of winter so magnificent. But there was
not the slightest gleam or dazzle, either on the window or on the snow;
so that the good lady could look all over the garden, and see
everything and everybody in it. And what do you think she saw there?
Violet and Peony, of course, her own two darling children. Ah, but whom
or what did she see besides? Why, if you will believe me, there was a
small figure of a girl, dressed all in white, with rose-tinged cheeks
and ringlets of golden hue, playing about the garden with the two
children! A stranger though she was, the child seemed to be on as
familiar terms with Violet and Peony, and they with her, as if all the
three had been playmates during the whole of their little lives. The
mother thought to herself that it must certainly be the daughter of one
of the neighbors, and that, seeing Violet and Peony in the garden, the
child had run across the street to play with them. So this kind lady
went to the door, intending to invite the little runaway into her
comfortable parlor; for, now that the sunshine was withdrawn, the
atmosphere, out of doors, was already growing very cold.

But, after opening the house-door, she stood an instant on the
threshold, hesitating whether she ought to ask the child to come in, or
whether she should even speak to her. Indeed, she almost doubted
whether it were a real child after all, or only a light wreath of the
new-fallen snow, blown hither and thither about the garden by the
intensely cold west-wind. There was certainly something very singular
in the aspect of the little stranger. Among all the children of the
neighborhood, the lady could remember no such face, with its pure
white, and delicate rose-color, and the golden ringlets tossing about
the forehead and cheeks. And as for her dress, which was entirely of
white, and fluttering in the breeze, it was such as no reasonable woman
would put upon a little girl, when sending her out to play, in the
depth of winter. It made this kind and careful mother shiver only to
look at those small feet, with nothing in the world on them, except a
very thin pair of white slippers. Nevertheless, airily as she was clad,
the child seemed to feel not the slightest inconvenience from the cold,
but danced so lightly over the snow that the tips of her toes left
hardly a print in its surface; while Violet could but just keep pace
with her, and Peony’s short legs compelled him to lag behind.

Once, in the course of their play, the strange child placed herself
between Violet and Peony, and taking a hand of each, skipped merrily
forward, and they along with her. Almost immediately, however, Peony
pulled away his little fist, and began to rub it as if the fingers were
tingling with cold; while Violet also released herself, though with
less abruptness, gravely remarking that it was better not to take hold
of hands. The white-robed damsel said not a word, but danced about,
just as merrily as before. If Violet and Peony did not choose to play
with her, she could make just as good a playmate of the brisk and cold
west-wind, which kept blowing her all about the garden, and took such
liberties with her, that they seemed to have been friends for a long
time. All this while, the mother stood on the threshold, wondering how
a little girl could look so much like a flying snow-drift, or how a
snow-drift could look so very like a little girl.

She called Violet, and whispered to her.

“Violet my darling, what is this child’s name?” asked she. “Does she
live near us?”

“Why, dearest mamma,” answered Violet, laughing to think that her
mother did not comprehend so very plain an affair, “this is our little
snow-sister whom we have just been making!”

“Yes, dear mamma,” cried Peony, running to his mother, and looking up
simply into her face. “This is our snow-image! Is it not a nice ’ittle
child?”

At this instant a flock of snow-birds came flitting through the air. As
was very natural, they avoided Violet and Peony. But—and this looked
strange—they flew at once to the white-robed child, fluttered eagerly
about her head, alighted on her shoulders, and seemed to claim her as
an old acquaintance. She, on her part, was evidently as glad to see
these little birds, old Winter’s grandchildren, as they were to see
her, and welcomed them by holding out both her hands. Hereupon, they
each and all tried to alight on her two palms and ten small fingers and
thumbs, crowding one another off, with an immense fluttering of their
tiny wings. One dear little bird nestled tenderly in her bosom; another
put its bill to her lips. They were as joyous, all the while, and
seemed as much in their element, as you may have seen them when
sporting with a snow-storm.

Violet and Peony stood laughing at this pretty sight; for they enjoyed
the merry time which their new playmate was having with these
small-winged visitants, almost as much as if they themselves took part
in it.

“Violet,” said her mother, greatly perplexed, “tell me the truth,
without any jest. Who is this little girl?”

“My darling mamma,” answered Violet, looking seriously into her
mother’s face, and apparently surprised that she should need any
further explanation, “I have told you truly who she is. It is our
little snow-image, which Peony and I have been making. Peony will tell
you so, as well as I.”

“Yes, mamma,” asseverated Peony, with much gravity in his crimson
little phiz; “this is ’ittle snow-child. Is not she a nice one? But,
mamma, her hand is, oh, so very cold!”

While mamma still hesitated what to think and what to do, the
street-gate was thrown open, and the father of Violet and Peony
appeared, wrapped in a pilot-cloth sack, with a fur cap drawn down over
his ears, and the thickest of gloves upon his hands. Mr. Lindsey was a
middle-aged man, with a weary and yet a happy look in his wind-flushed
and frost-pinched face, as if he had been busy all the day long, and
was glad to get back to his quiet home. His eyes brightened at the
sight of his wife and children, although he could not help uttering a
word or two of surprise, at finding the whole family in the open air,
on so bleak a day, and after sunset too. He soon perceived the little
white stranger sporting to and fro in the garden, like a dancing
snow-wreath, and the flock of snow-birds fluttering about her head.

“Pray, what little girl may that be?” inquired this very sensible man.
“Surely her mother must be crazy to let her go out in such bitter
weather as it has been to-day, with only that flimsy white gown and
those thin slippers!”

“My dear husband,” said his wife, “I know no more about the little
thing than you do. Some neighbor’s child, I suppose. Our Violet and
Peony,” she added, laughing at herself for repeating so absurd a story,
“insist that she is nothing but a snow-image, which they have been busy
about in the garden, almost all the afternoon.”

As she said this, the mother glanced her eyes toward the spot where the
children’s snow-image had been made. What was her surprise, on
perceiving that there was not the slightest trace of so much labor!—no
image at all!—no piled up heap of snow!—nothing whatever, save the
prints of little footsteps around a vacant space!

“This is very strange!” said she.

“What is strange, dear mother?” asked Violet. “Dear father, do not you
see how it is? This is our snow-image, which Peony and I have made,
because we wanted another playmate. Did not we, Peony?”

“Yes, papa,” said crimson Peony. “This be our ’ittle snow-sister. Is
she not beau-ti-ful? But she gave me such a cold kiss!”

“Poh, nonsense, children!” cried their good, honest father, who, as we
have already intimated, had an exceedingly common-sensible way of
looking at matters. “Do not tell me of making live figures out of snow.
Come, wife; this little stranger must not stay out in the bleak air a
moment longer. We will bring her into the parlor; and you shall give
her a supper of warm bread and milk, and make her as comfortable as you
can. Meanwhile, I will inquire among the neighbors; or, if necessary,
send the city-crier about the streets, to give notice of a lost child.”

So saying, this honest and very kind-hearted man was going toward the
little white damsel, with the best intentions in the world. But Violet
and Peony, each seizing their father by the hand, earnestly besought
him not to make her come in.

“Dear father,” cried Violet, putting herself before him, “it is true
what I have been telling you! This is our little snow-girl, and she
cannot live any longer than while she breathes the cold west-wind. Do
not make her come into the hot room!”

“Yes, father,” shouted Peony, stamping his little foot, so mightily was
he in earnest, “this be nothing but our ’ittle snow-child! She will not
love the hot fire!”

“Nonsense, children, nonsense, nonsense!” cried the father, half vexed,
half laughing at what he considered their foolish obstinacy. “Run into
the house, this moment! It is too late to play any longer, now. I must
take care of this little girl immediately, or she will catch her
death-a-cold!”

“Husband! dear husband!” said his wife, in a low voice,—for she had
been looking narrowly at the snow-child, and was more perplexed than
ever,—“there is something very singular in all this. You will think me
foolish,—but—but—may it not be that some invisible angel has been
attracted by the simplicity and good faith with which our children set
about their undertaking? May he not have spent an hour of his
immortality in playing with those dear little souls? and so the result
is what we call a miracle. No, no! Do not laugh at me; I see what a
foolish thought it is!”

“My dear wife,” replied the husband, laughing heartily, “you are as
much a child as Violet and Peony.”

And in one sense so she was, for all through life she had kept her
heart full of childlike simplicity and faith, which was as pure and
clear as crystal; and, looking at all matters through this transparent
medium, she sometimes saw truths so profound that other people laughed
at them as nonsense and absurdity.

But now kind Mr. Lindsey had entered the garden, breaking away from his
two children, who still sent their shrill voices after him, beseeching
him to let the snow-child stay and enjoy herself in the cold west-wind.
As he approached, the snow-birds took to flight. The little white
damsel, also, fled backward, shaking her head, as if to say, “Pray, do
not touch me!” and roguishly, as it appeared, leading him through the
deepest of the snow. Once, the good man stumbled, and floundered down
upon his face, so that, gathering himself up again, with the snow
sticking to his rough pilot-cloth sack, he looked as white and wintry
as a snow-image of the largest size. Some of the neighbors, meanwhile,
seeing him from their windows, wondered what could possess poor Mr.
Lindsey to be running about his garden in pursuit of a snow-drift,
which the west-wind was driving hither and thither! At length, after a
vast deal of trouble, he chased the little stranger into a corner,
where she could not possibly escape him. His wife had been looking on,
and, it being nearly twilight, was wonder-struck to observe how the
snow-child gleamed and sparkled, and how she seemed to shed a glow all
round about her; and when driven into the corner, she positively
glistened like a star! It was a frosty kind of brightness, too, like
that of an icicle in the moonlight. The wife thought it strange that
good Mr. Lindsey should see nothing remarkable in the snow-child’s
appearance.

“Come, you odd little thing!” cried the honest man, seizing her by the
hand, “I have caught you at last, and will make you comfortable in
spite of yourself. We will put a nice warm pair of worsted stockings on
your frozen little feet, and you shall have a good thick shawl to wrap
yourself in. Your poor white nose, I am afraid, is actually
frost-bitten. But we will make it all right. Come along in.”

And so, with a most benevolent smile on his sagacious visage, all
purple as it was with the cold, this very well-meaning gentleman took
the snow-child by the hand and led her towards the house. She followed
him, droopingly and reluctant; for all the glow and sparkle was gone
out of her figure; and whereas just before she had resembled a bright,
frosty, star-gemmed evening, with a crimson gleam on the cold horizon,
she now looked as dull and languid as a thaw. As kind Mr. Lindsey led
her up the steps of the door, Violet and Peony looked into his
face,—their eyes full of tears, which froze before they could run down
their cheeks,—and again entreated him not to bring their snow-image
into the house.

“Not bring her in!” exclaimed the kind-hearted man. “Why, you are
crazy, my little Violet!—quite crazy, my small Peony! She is so cold,
already, that her hand has almost frozen mine, in spite of my thick
gloves. Would you have her freeze to death?”

His wife, as he came up the steps, had been taking another long,
earnest, almost awe-stricken gaze at the little white stranger. She
hardly knew whether it was a dream or no; but she could not help
fancying that she saw the delicate print of Violet’s fingers on the
child’s neck. It looked just as if, while Violet was shaping out the
image, she had given it a gentle pat with her hand, and had neglected
to smooth the impression quite away.

“After all, husband,” said the mother, recurring to her idea that the
angels would be as much delighted to play with Violet and Peony as she
herself was,—“after all, she does look strangely like a snow-image! I
do believe she is made of snow!”

A puff of the west-wind blew against the snow-child, and again she
sparkled like a star.

“Snow!” repeated good Mr. Lindsey, drawing the reluctant guest over his
hospitable threshold. “No wonder she looks like snow. She is half
frozen, poor little thing! But a good fire will put everything to
rights!”

Without further talk, and always with the same best intentions, this
highly benevolent and common-sensible individual led the little white
damsel—drooping, drooping, drooping, more and more out of the frosty
air, and into his comfortable parlor. A Heidenberg stove, filled to the
brim with intensely burning anthracite, was sending a bright gleam
through the isinglass of its iron door, and causing the vase of water
on its top to fume and bubble with excitement. A warm, sultry smell was
diffused throughout the room. A thermometer on the wall farthest from
the stove stood at eighty degrees. The parlor was hung with red
curtains, and covered with a red carpet, and looked just as warm as it
felt. The difference betwixt the atmosphere here and the cold, wintry
twilight out of doors, was like stepping at once from Nova Zembla to
the hottest part of India, or from the North Pole into an oven. Oh,
this was a fine place for the little white stranger!

The common-sensible man placed the snow-child on the hearth-rug, right
in front of the hissing and fuming stove.

“Now she will be comfortable!” cried Mr. Lindsey, rubbing his hands and
looking about him, with the pleasantest smile you ever saw. “Make
yourself at home, my child.”

Sad, sad and drooping, looked the little white maiden, as she stood on
the hearth-rug, with the hot blast of the stove striking through her
like a pestilence. Once, she threw a glance wistfully toward the
windows, and caught a glimpse, through its red curtains, of the
snow-covered roofs, and the stars glimmering frostily, and all the
delicious intensity of the cold night. The bleak wind rattled the
window-panes, as if it were summoning her to come forth. But there
stood the snow-child, drooping, before the hot stove!

But the common-sensible man saw nothing amiss.

“Come wife,” said he, “let her have a pair of thick stockings and a
woollen shawl or blanket directly; and tell Dora to give her some warm
supper as soon as the milk boils. You, Violet and Peony, amuse your
little friend. She is out of spirits, you see, at finding herself in a
strange place. For my part, I will go around among the neighbors, and
find out where she belongs.”

The mother, meanwhile, had gone in search of the shawl and stockings;
for her own view of the matter, however subtle and delicate, had given
way, as it always did, to the stubborn materialism of her husband.
Without heeding the remonstrances of his two children, who still kept
murmuring that their little snow-sister did not love the warmth, good
Mr. Lindsey took his departure, shutting the parlor-door carefully
behind him. Turning up the collar of his sack over his ears, he emerged
from the house, and had barely reached the street-gate, when he was
recalled by the screams of Violet and Peony, and the rapping of a
thimbled finger against the parlor window.

“Husband! husband!” cried his wife, showing her horror-stricken face
through the window-panes. “There is no need of going for the child’s
parents!”

“We told you so, father!” screamed Violet and Peony, as he re-entered
the parlor. “You would bring her in; and now our poor—dear-beau-ti-ful
little snow-sister is thawed!”

And their own sweet little faces were already dissolved in tears; so
that their father, seeing what strange things occasionally happen in
this every-day world, felt not a little anxious lest his children might
be going to thaw too! In the utmost perplexity, he demanded an
explanation of his wife. She could only reply, that, being summoned to
the parlor by the cries of Violet and Peony, she found no trace of the
little white maiden, unless it were the remains of a heap of snow,
which, while she was gazing at it, melted quite away upon the
hearth-rug.

“And there you see all that is left of it!” added she, pointing to a
pool of water in front of the stove.

“Yes, father,” said Violet looking reproachfully at him, through her
tears, “there is all that is left of our dear little snow-sister!”

“Naughty father!” cried Peony, stamping his foot, and—I shudder to
say—shaking his little fist at the common-sensible man. “We told you
how it would be! What for did you bring her in?”

And the Heidenberg stove, through the isinglass of its door, seemed to
glare at good Mr. Lindsey, like a red-eyed demon, triumphing in the
mischief which it had done!

This, you will observe, was one of those rare cases, which yet will
occasionally happen, where common-sense finds itself at fault. The
remarkable story of the snow-image, though to that sagacious class of
people to whom good Mr. Lindsey belongs it may seem but a childish
affair, is, nevertheless, capable of being moralized in various
methods, greatly for their edification. One of its lessons, for
instance, might be, that it behooves men, and especially men of
benevolence, to consider well what they are about, and, before acting
on their philanthropic purposes, to be quite sure that they comprehend
the nature and all the relations of the business in hand. What has been
established as an element of good to one being may prove absolute
mischief to another; even as the warmth of the parlor was proper enough
for children of flesh and blood, like Violet and Peony,—though by no
means very wholesome, even for them,—but involved nothing short of
annihilation to the unfortunate snow-image.

But, after all, there is no teaching anything to wise men of good Mr.
Lindsey’s stamp. They know everything,—oh, to be sure!—everything that
has been, and everything that is, and everything that, by any future
possibility, can be. And, should some phenomenon of nature or
providence transcend their system, they will not recognize it, even if
it come to pass under their very noses.

“Wife,” said Mr. Lindsey, after a fit of silence, “see what a quantity
of snow the children have brought in on their feet! It has made quite a
puddle here before the stove. Pray tell Dora to bring some towels and
mop it up!”




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 hill-sides. 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.

It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or womanhood with
the Great Stone Face before their eyes, for all the features were
noble, and the expression was at once grand and sweet, as if it were
the glow of a vast, warm heart, that embraced all mankind in its
affections, and had room for more. It was an education only to look at
it. According to the belief of many people, the valley owed much of its
fertility to this benign aspect that was continually beaming over it,
illuminating the clouds, and infusing its tenderness into the sunshine.

As we began with saying, a mother and her little boy sat at their
cottage-door, gazing at the Great Stone Face, and talking about it. The
child’s name was Ernest.

“Mother,” said he, while the Titanic visage smiled on him, “I wish that
it could speak, for it looks so very kindly that its voice must needs
be pleasant. If I were to see a man with such a face, I should love him
dearly.”

“If an old prophecy should come to pass,” answered his mother, “we may
see a man, some time or other, with exactly such a face as that.”

“What prophecy do you mean, dear mother?” eagerly inquired Ernest.
“Pray tell me about it!”

So his mother told him a story that her own mother had told to her,
when she herself was younger than little Ernest; a story, not of things
that were past, but of what was yet to come; a story, nevertheless, so
very old, that even the Indians, who formerly inhabited this valley,
had heard it from their forefathers, to whom, as they affirmed, it had
been murmured by the mountain streams, and whispered by the wind among
the tree-tops. The purport was, that, at some future day, a child
should be born hereabouts, who was destined to become the greatest and
noblest personage of his time, and whose countenance, in manhood,
should bear an exact resemblance to the Great Stone Face. Not a few
old-fashioned people, and young ones likewise, in the ardor of their
hopes, still cherished an enduring faith in this old prophecy. But
others, who had seen more of the world, had watched and waited till
they were weary, and had beheld no man with such a face, nor any man
that proved to be much greater or nobler than his neighbors, concluded
it to be nothing but an idle tale. At all events, the great man of the
prophecy had not yet appeared.

“O mother, dear mother!” cried Ernest, clapping his hands above his
head, “I do hope that I shall live to see him!”

His mother was an affectionate and thoughtful woman, and felt that it
was wisest not to discourage the generous hopes of her little boy. So
she only said to him, “Perhaps you may.”

And Ernest never forgot the story that his mother told him. It was
always in his mind, whenever he looked upon the Great Stone Face. He
spent his childhood in the log-cottage where he was born, and was
dutiful to his mother, and helpful to her in many things, assisting her
much with his little hands, and more with his loving heart. In this
manner, from a happy yet often pensive child, he grew up to be a mild,
quiet, unobtrusive boy, and sun-browned with labor in the fields, but
with more intelligence brightening his aspect than is seen in many lads
who have been taught at famous schools. Yet Ernest had had no teacher,
save only that the Great Stone Face became one to him. When the toil of
the day was over, he would gaze at it for hours, until he began to
imagine that those vast features recognized him, and gave him a smile
of kindness and encouragement, responsive to his own look of
veneration. We must not take upon us to affirm that this was a mistake,
although the Face may have looked no more kindly at Ernest than at all
the world besides. But the secret was that the boy’s tender and
confiding simplicity discerned what other people could not see; and
thus the love, which was meant for all, became his peculiar portion.

About this time there went a rumor throughout the valley, that the
great man, foretold from ages long ago, who was to bear a resemblance
to the Great Stone Face, had appeared at last. It seems that, many
years before, a young man had migrated from the valley and settled at a
distant seaport, where, after getting together a little money, he had
set up as a shopkeeper. His name—but I could never learn whether it was
his real one, or a nickname that had grown out of his habits and
success in life—was Gathergold. Being shrewd and active, and endowed by
Providence with that inscrutable faculty which develops itself in what
the world calls luck, he became an exceedingly rich merchant, and owner
of a whole fleet of bulky-bottomed ships. All the countries of the
globe appeared to join hands for the mere purpose of adding heap after
heap to the mountainous accumulation of this one man’s wealth. The cold
regions of the north, almost within the gloom and shadow of the Arctic
Circle, sent him their tribute in the shape of furs; hot Africa sifted
for him the golden sands of her rivers, and gathered up the ivory tusks
of her great elephants out of the forests; the East came bringing him
the rich shawls, and spices, and teas, and the effulgence of diamonds,
and the gleaming purity of large pearls. The ocean, not to be
behindhand with the earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr.
Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit of it. Be the
original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It
might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he
touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was
changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better,
into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very rich
that it would have taken him a hundred years only to count his wealth,
he bethought himself of his native valley, and resolved to go back
thither, and end his days where he was born. With this purpose in view,
he sent a skilful architect to build him such a palace as should be fit
for a man of his vast wealth to live in.

As I have said above, it had already been rumored in the valley that
Mr. Gathergold had turned out to be the prophetic personage so long and
vainly looked for, and that his visage was the perfect and undeniable
similitude of the Great Stone Face. People were the more ready to
believe that this must needs be the fact, when they beheld the splendid
edifice that rose, as if by enchantment, on the site of his father’s
old weatherbeaten farm-house. The exterior was of marble, so dazzlingly
white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in
the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his
young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of
transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly
ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a
lofty door, studded with silver knobs, and made of a kind of variegated
wood that had been brought from beyond the sea. The windows, from the
floor to the ceiling of each stately apartment, were composed,
respectively, of but one enormous pane of glass, so transparently pure
that it was said to be a finer medium than even the vacant atmosphere.
Hardly anybody had been permitted to see the interior of this palace;
but it was reported, and with good semblance of truth, to be far more
gorgeous than the outside, insomuch that whatever was iron or brass in
other houses was silver or gold in this; and Mr. Gathergold’s
bedchamber, especially, made such a glittering appearance that no
ordinary man would have been able to close his eyes there. But, on the
other hand, Mr. Gathergold was now so inured to wealth, that perhaps he
could not have closed his eyes unless where the gleam of it was certain
to find its way beneath his eyelids.

In due time, the mansion was finished; next came the upholsterers, with
magnificent furniture; then, a whole troop of black and white servants,
the harbingers of Mr. Gathergold, who, in his own majestic person, was
expected to arrive at sunset. Our friend Ernest, meanwhile, had been
deeply stirred by the idea that the great man, the noble man, the man
of prophecy, after so many ages of delay, was at length to be made
manifest to his native valley. He knew, boy as he was, that there were
a thousand ways in which Mr. Gathergold, with his vast wealth, might
transform himself into an angel of beneficence, and assume a control
over human affairs as wide and benignant as the smile of the Great
Stone Face. Full of faith and hope, Ernest doubted not that what the
people said was true, and that now he was to behold the living likeness
of those wondrous features on the mountain-side. While the boy was
still gazing up the valley, and fancying, as he always did, that the
Great Stone Face returned his gaze and looked kindly at him, the
rumbling of wheels was heard, approaching swiftly along the winding
road.

“Here he comes!” cried a group of people who were assembled to witness
the arrival. “Here comes the great Mr. Gathergold!”

A carriage, drawn by four horses, dashed round the turn of the road.
Within it, thrust partly out of the window, appeared the physiognomy of
the old man, with a skin as yellow as if his own Midas-hand had
transmuted it. He had a low forehead, small, sharp eyes, puckered about
with innumerable wrinkles, and very thin lips, which he made still
thinner by pressing them forcibly together.

“The very image of the Great Stone Face!” shouted the people. “Sure
enough, the old prophecy is true; and here we have the great man come,
at last!”

And, what greatly perplexed Ernest, they seemed actually to believe
that here was the likeness which they spoke of. By the roadside there
chanced to be an old beggar-woman and two little beggar-children,
stragglers from some far-off region, who, as the carriage rolled
onward, held out their hands and lifted up their doleful voices, most
piteously beseeching charity. A yellow claw—the very same that had
clawed together so much wealth—poked itself out of the coach-window,
and dropt some copper coins upon the ground; so that, though the great
man’s name seems to have been Gathergold, he might just as suitably
have been nicknamed Scattercopper. Still, nevertheless, with an earnest
shout, and evidently with as much good faith as ever, the people
bellowed, “He is the very image of the Great Stone Face!”

But Ernest turned sadly from the wrinkled shrewdness of that sordid
visage, and gazed up the valley, where, amid a gathering mist, gilded
by the last sunbeams, he could still distinguish those glorious
features which had impressed themselves into his soul. Their aspect
cheered him. What did the benign lips seem to say?

“He will come! Fear not, Ernest; the man will come!”

The years went on, and Ernest ceased to be a boy. He had grown to be a
young man now. He attracted little notice from the other inhabitants of
the valley; for they saw nothing remarkable in his way of life save
that, when the labor of the day was over, he still loved to go apart
and gaze and meditate upon the Great Stone Face. According to their
idea of the matter, it was a folly, indeed, but pardonable, inasmuch as
Ernest was industrious, kind, and neighborly, and neglected no duty for
the sake of indulging this idle habit. They knew not that the Great
Stone Face had become a teacher to him, and that the sentiment which
was expressed in it would enlarge the young man’s heart, and fill it
with wider and deeper sympathies than other hearts. They knew not that
thence would come a better wisdom than could be learned from books, and
a better life than could be moulded on the defaced example of other
human lives. Neither did Ernest know that the thoughts and affections
which came to him so naturally, in the fields and at the fireside, and
wherever he communed with himself, were of a higher tone than those
which all men shared with him. A simple soul,—simple as when his mother
first taught him the old prophecy,—he beheld the marvellous features
beaming adown the valley, and still wondered that their human
counterpart was so long in making his appearance.

By this time poor Mr. Gathergold was dead and buried; and the oddest
part of the matter was, that his wealth, which was the body and spirit
of his existence, had disappeared before his death, leaving nothing of
him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled yellow skin.
Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded
that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the
ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the
mountain-side. So the people ceased to honor him during his lifetime,
and quietly consigned him to forgetfulness after his decease. Once in a
while, it is true, his memory was brought up in connection with the
magnificent palace which he had built, and which had long ago been
turned into a hotel for the accommodation of strangers, multitudes of
whom came, every summer, to visit that famous natural curiosity, the
Great Stone Face. Thus, Mr. Gathergold being discredited and thrown
into the shade, the man of prophecy was yet to come.

It so happened that a native-born son of the valley, many years before,
had enlisted as a soldier, and, after a great deal of hard fighting,
had now become an illustrious commander. Whatever he may be called in
history, he was known in camps and on the battle-field under the
nickname of Old Blood-and-Thunder. This war-worn veteran being now
infirm with age and wounds, and weary of the turmoil of a military
life, and of the roll of the drum and the clangor of the trumpet, that
had so long been ringing in his ears, had lately signified a purpose of
returning to his native valley, hoping to find repose where he
remembered to have left it. The inhabitants, his old neighbors and
their grown-up children, were resolved to welcome the renowned warrior
with a salute of cannon and a public dinner; and all the more
enthusiastically, it being affirmed that now, at last, the likeness of
the Great Stone Face had actually appeared. An aid-de-camp of Old
Blood-and-Thunder, travelling through the valley, was said to have been
struck with the resemblance. Moreover the schoolmates and early
acquaintances of the general were ready to testify, on oath, that, to
the best of their recollection, the aforesaid general had been
exceedingly like the majestic image, even when a boy, only the idea had
never occurred to them at that period. Great, therefore, was the
excitement throughout the valley; and many people, who had never once
thought of glancing at the Great Stone Face for years before, now spent
their time in gazing at it, for the sake of knowing exactly how General
Blood-and-Thunder looked.

On the day of the great festival, Ernest, with all the other people of
the valley, left their work, and proceeded to the spot where the sylvan
banquet was prepared. As he approached, the loud voice of the Rev. Dr.
Battleblast was heard, beseeching a blessing on the good things set
before them, and on the distinguished friend of peace in whose honor
they were assembled. The tables were arranged in a cleared space of the
woods, shut in by the surrounding trees, except where a vista opened
eastward, and afforded a distant view of the Great Stone Face. Over the
general’s chair, which was a relic from the home of Washington, there
was an arch of verdant boughs, with the laurel profusely intermixed,
and surmounted by his country’s banner, beneath which he had won his
victories. Our friend Ernest raised himself on his tiptoes, in hopes to
get a glimpse of the celebrated guest; but there was a mighty crowd
about the tables anxious to hear the toasts and speeches, and to catch
any word that might fall from the general in reply; and a volunteer
company, doing duty as a guard, pricked ruthlessly with their bayonets
at any particularly quiet person among the throng. So Ernest, being of
an unobtrusive character, was thrust quite into the background, where
he could see no more of Old Blood-and-Thunder’s physiognomy than if it
had been still blazing on the battle-field. To console himself, he
turned towards the Great Stone Face, which, like a faithful and long
remembered friend, looked back and smiled upon him through the vista of
the forest. Meantime, however, he could overhear the remarks of various
individuals, who were comparing the features of the hero with the face
on the distant mountain-side.

“’Tis the same face, to a hair!” cried one man, cutting a caper for
joy.

“Wonderfully like, that’s a fact!” responded another.

“Like! why, I call it Old Blood-and-Thunder himself, in a monstrous
looking-glass!” cried a third. “And why not? He’s the greatest man of
this or any other age, beyond a doubt.”

And then all three of the speakers gave a great shout, which
communicated electricity to the crowd, and called forth a roar from a
thousand voices, that went reverberating for miles among the mountains,
until you might have supposed that the Great Stone Face had poured its
thunderbreath into the cry. All these comments, and this vast
enthusiasm, served the more to interest our friend; nor did he think of
questioning that now, at length, the mountain-visage had found its
human counterpart. It is true, Ernest had imagined that this
long-looked-for personage would appear in the character of a man of
peace, uttering wisdom, and doing good, and making people happy. But,
taking an habitual breadth of view, with all his simplicity, he
contended that Providence should choose its own method of blessing
mankind, and could conceive that this great end might be effected even
by a warrior and a bloody sword, should inscrutable wisdom see fit to
order matters so.

“The general! the general!” was now the cry. “Hush! silence! Old
Blood-and-Thunder’s going to make a speech.”

Even so; for, the cloth being removed, the general’s health had been
drunk, amid shouts of applause, and he now stood upon his feet to thank
the company. Ernest saw him. There he was, over the shoulders of the
crowd, from the two glittering epaulets and embroidered collar upward,
beneath the arch of green boughs with intertwined laurel, and the
banner drooping as if to shade his brow! And there, too, visible in the
same glance, through the vista of the forest, appeared the Great Stone
Face! And was there, indeed, such a resemblance as the crowd had
testified? Alas, Ernest could not recognize it! He beheld a war-worn
and weatherbeaten countenance, full of energy, and expressive of an
iron will; but the gentle wisdom, the deep, broad, tender sympathies,
were altogether wanting in Old Blood-and-Thunder’s visage; and even if
the Great Stone Face had assumed his look of stern command, the milder
traits would still have tempered it.

“This is not the man of prophecy,” sighed Ernest to himself, as he made
his way out of the throng. “And must the world wait longer yet?”

The mists had congregated about the distant mountain-side, and there
were seen the grand and awful features of the Great Stone Face, awful
but benignant, as if a mighty angel were sitting among the hills, and
enrobing himself in a cloud-vesture of gold and purple. As he looked,
Ernest could hardly believe but that a smile beamed over the whole
visage, with a radiance still brightening, although without motion of
the lips. It was probably the effect of the western sunshine, melting
through the thinly diffused vapors that had swept between him and the
object that he gazed at. But—as it always did—the aspect of his
marvellous friend made Ernest as hopeful as if he had never hoped in
vain.

“Fear not, Ernest,” said his heart, even as if the Great Face were
whispering him,—“fear not, Ernest; he will come.”

More years sped swiftly and tranquilly away. Ernest still dwelt in his
native valley, and was now a man of middle age. By imperceptible
degrees, he had become known among the people. Now, as heretofore, he
labored for his bread, and was the same simple-hearted man that he had
always been. But he had thought and felt so much, he had given so many
of the best hours of his life to unworldly hopes for some great good to
mankind, that it seemed as though he had been talking with the angels,
and had imbibed a portion of their wisdom unawares. It was visible in
the calm and well-considered beneficence of his daily life, the quiet
stream of which had made a wide green margin all along its course. Not
a day passed by, that the world was not the better because this man,
humble as he was, had lived. He never stepped aside from his own path,
yet would always reach a blessing to his neighbor. Almost involuntarily
too, he had become a preacher. The pure and high simplicity of his
thought, which, as one of its manifestations, took shape in the good
deeds that dropped silently from his hand, flowed also forth in speech.
He uttered truths that wrought upon and moulded the lives of those who
heard him. His auditors, it may be, never suspected that Ernest, their
own neighbor and familiar friend, was more than an ordinary man; least
of all did Ernest himself suspect it; but, inevitably as the murmur of
a rivulet, came thoughts out of his mouth that no other human lips had
spoken.

When the people’s minds had had a little time to cool, they were ready
enough to acknowledge their mistake in imagining a similarity between
General Blood-and-Thunder’s truculent physiognomy and the benign visage
on the mountain-side. But now, again, there were reports and many
paragraphs in the newspapers, affirming that the likeness of the Great
Stone Face had appeared upon the broad shoulders of a certain eminent
statesman. He, like Mr. Gathergold and Old Blood-and-Thunder, was a
native of the valley, but had left it in his early days, and taken up
the trades of law and politics. Instead of the rich man’s wealth and
the warrior’s sword, he had but a tongue, and it was mightier than both
together. So wonderfully eloquent was he, that whatever he might choose
to say, his auditors had no choice but to believe him; wrong looked
like right, and right like wrong; for when it pleased him, he could
make a kind of illuminated fog with his mere breath, and obscure the
natural daylight with it. His tongue, indeed, was a magic instrument:
sometimes it rumbled like the thunder; sometimes it warbled like the
sweetest music. It was the blast of war, the song of peace; and it
seemed to have a heart in it, when there was no such matter. In good
truth, he was a wondrous man; and when his tongue had acquired him all
other imaginable success,—when it had been heard in halls of state, and
in the courts of princes and potentates,—after it had made him known
all over the world, even as a voice crying from shore to shore,—it
finally persuaded his countrymen to select him for the Presidency.
Before this time,—indeed, as soon as he began to grow celebrated,—his
admirers had found out the resemblance between him and the Great Stone
Face; and so much were they struck by it, that throughout the country
this distinguished gentleman was known by the name of Old Stony Phiz.
The phrase was considered as giving a highly favorable aspect to his
political prospects; for, as is likewise the case with the Popedom,
nobody ever becomes President without taking a name other than his own.

While his friends were doing their best to make him President, Old
Stony Phiz, as he was called, set out on a visit to the valley where he
was born. Of course, he had no other object than to shake hands with
his fellow-citizens and neither thought nor cared about any effect
which his progress through the country might have upon the election.
Magnificent preparations were made to receive the illustrious
statesman; a cavalcade of horsemen set forth to meet him at the
boundary line of the State, and all the people left their business and
gathered along the wayside to see him pass. Among these was Ernest.
Though more than once disappointed, as we have seen, he had such a
hopeful and confiding nature, that he was always ready to believe in
whatever seemed beautiful and good. He kept his heart continually open,
and thus was sure to catch the blessing from on high when it should
come. So now again, as buoyantly as ever, he went forth to behold the
likeness of the Great Stone Face.

The cavalcade came prancing along the road, with a great clattering of
hoofs and a mighty cloud of dust, which rose up so dense and high that
the visage of the mountain-side was completely hidden from Ernest’s
eyes. All the great men of the neighborhood were there on horseback;
militia officers, in uniform; the member of Congress; the sheriff of
the county; the editors of newspapers; and many a farmer, too, had
mounted his patient steed, with his Sunday coat upon his back. It
really was a very brilliant spectacle, especially as there were
numerous banners flaunting over the cavalcade, on some of which were
gorgeous portraits of the illustrious statesman and the Great Stone
Face, smiling familiarly at one another, like two brothers. If the
pictures were to be trusted, the mutual resemblance, it must be
confessed, was marvellous. We must not forget to mention that there was
a band of music, which made the echoes of the mountains ring and
reverberate with the loud triumph of its strains; so that airy and
soul-thrilling melodies broke out among all the heights and hollows, as
if every nook of his native valley had found a voice, to welcome the
distinguished guest. But the grandest effect was when the far-off
mountain precipice flung back the music; for then the Great Stone Face
itself seemed to be swelling the triumphant chorus, in acknowledgment
that, at length, the man of prophecy was come.

All this while the people were throwing up their hats and shouting with
enthusiasm so contagious that the heart of Ernest kindled up, and he
likewise threw up his hat, and shouted, as loudly as the loudest,
“Huzza for the great man! Huzza for Old Stony Phiz!” But as yet he had
not seen him.

“Here he is, now!” cried those who stood near Ernest. “There! There!
Look at Old Stony Phiz and then at the Old Man of the Mountain, and see
if they are not as like as two twin-brothers!”

In the midst of all this gallant array came an open barouche, drawn by
four white horses; and in the barouche, with his massive head
uncovered, sat the illustrious statesman, Old Stony Phiz himself.

“Confess it,” said one of Ernest’s neighbors to him, “the Great Stone
Face has met its match at last!”

Now, it must be owned that, at his first glimpse of the countenance
which was bowing and smiling from the barouche, Ernest did fancy that
there was a resemblance between it and the old familiar face upon the
mountain-side. The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all
the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in
emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model. But the sublimity
and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that
illuminated the mountain visage and etherealized its ponderous granite
substance into spirit, might here be sought in vain. Something had been
originally left out, or had departed. And therefore the marvellously
gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his
eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings or a man of mighty
faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances,
was vague and empty, because no high purpose had endowed it with
reality.

Still, Ernest’s neighbor was thrusting his elbow into his side, and
pressing him for an answer.

“Confess! confess! Is not he the very picture of your Old Man of the
Mountain?”

“No!” said Ernest bluntly, “I see little or no likeness.”

“Then so much the worse for the Great Stone Face!” answered his
neighbor; and again he set up a shout for Old Stony Phiz.

But Ernest turned away, melancholy, and almost despondent: for this was
the saddest of his disappointments, to behold a man who might have
fulfilled the prophecy, and had not willed to do so. Meantime, the
cavalcade, the banners, the music, and the barouches swept past him,
with the vociferous crowd in the rear, leaving the dust to settle down,
and the Great Stone Face to be revealed again, with the grandeur that
it had worn for untold centuries.

“Lo, here I am, Ernest!” the benign lips seemed to say. “I have waited
longer than thou, and am not yet weary. Fear not; the man will come.”

The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another’s
heels. And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over
the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead,
and furrows in his cheeks. He was an aged man. But not in vain had he
grown old: more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts
in his mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had
graved, and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been
tested by the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure.
Unsought for, undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made
him known in the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which
he had dwelt so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of
cities, came from far to see and converse with Ernest; for the report
had gone abroad that this simple husbandman had ideas unlike those of
other men, not gained from books, but of a higher tone,—a tranquil and
familiar majesty, as if he had been talking with the angels as his
daily friends. Whether it were sage, statesman, or philanthropist,
Ernest received these visitors with the gentle sincerity that had
characterized him from boyhood, and spoke freely with them of whatever
came uppermost, or lay deepest in his heart or their own. While they
talked together, his face would kindle, unawares, and shine upon them,
as with a mild evening light. Pensive with the fulness of such
discourse, his guests took leave and went their way; and passing up the
valley, paused to look at the Great Stone Face, imagining that they had
seen its likeness in a human countenance, but could not remember where.

While Ernest had been growing up and growing old, a bountiful
Providence had granted a new poet to this earth. He likewise, was a
native of the valley, but had spent the greater part of his life at a
distance from that romantic region, pouring out his sweet music amid
the bustle and din of cities. Often, however, did the mountains which
had been familiar to him in his childhood lift their snowy peaks into
the clear atmosphere of his poetry. Neither was the Great Stone Face
forgotten, for the poet had celebrated it in an ode, which was grand
enough to have been uttered by its own majestic lips. This man of
genius, we may say, had come down from heaven with wonderful
endowments. If he sang of a mountain, the eyes of all mankind beheld a
mightier grandeur reposing on its breast, or soaring to its summit,
than had before been seen there. If his theme were a lovely lake, a
celestial smile had now been thrown over it, to gleam forever on its
surface. If it were the vast old sea, even the deep immensity of its
dread bosom seemed to swell the higher, as if moved by the emotions of
the song. Thus the world assumed another and a better aspect from the
hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had
bestowed him, as the last best touch to his own handiwork. Creation was
not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.

The effect was no less high and beautiful, when his human brethren were
the subject of his verse. The man or woman, sordid with the common dust
of life, who crossed his daily path, and the little child who played in
it, were glorified if he beheld them in his mood of poetic faith. He
showed the golden links of the great chain that intertwined them with
an angelic kindred; he brought out the hidden traits of a celestial
birth that made them worthy of such kin. Some, indeed, there were, who
thought to show the soundness of their judgment by affirming that all
the beauty and dignity of the natural world existed only in the poet’s
fancy. Let such men speak for themselves, who undoubtedly appear to
have been spawned forth by Nature with a contemptuous bitterness; she
having plastered them up out of her refuse stuff, after all the swine
were made. As respects all things else, the poet’s ideal was the truest
truth.

The songs of this poet found their way to Ernest. He read them after
his customary toil, seated on the bench before his cottage-door, where
for such a length of time he had filled his repose with thought, by
gazing at the Great Stone Face. And now as he read stanzas that caused
the soul to thrill within him, he lifted his eyes to the vast
countenance beaming on him so benignantly.

“O majestic friend,” he murmured, addressing the Great Stone Face, “is
not this man worthy to resemble thee?”

The Face seemed to smile, but answered not a word.

Now it happened that the poet, though he dwelt so far away, had not
only heard of Ernest, but had meditated much upon his character, until
he deemed nothing so desirable as to meet this man, whose untaught
wisdom walked hand in hand with the noble simplicity of his life. One
summer morning, therefore, he took passage by the railroad, and, in the
decline of the afternoon, alighted from the cars at no great distance
from Ernest’s cottage. The great hotel, which had formerly been the
palace of Mr. Gathergold, was close at hand, but the poet, with his
carpet-bag on his arm, inquired at once where Ernest dwelt, and was
resolved to be accepted as his guest.

Approaching the door, he there found the good old man, holding a volume
in his hand, which alternately he read, and then, with a finger between
the leaves, looked lovingly at the Great Stone Face.

“Good evening,” said the poet. “Can you give a traveller a night’s
lodging?”

“Willingly,” answered Ernest; and then he added, smiling, “Methinks I
never saw the Great Stone Face look so hospitably at a stranger.”

The poet sat down on the bench beside him, and he and Ernest talked
together. Often had the poet held intercourse with the wittiest and the
wisest, but never before with a man like Ernest, whose thoughts and
feelings gushed up with such a natural freedom, and who made great
truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them. Angels, as had been
so often said, seemed to have wrought with him at his labor in the
fields; angels seemed to have sat with him by the fireside; and,
dwelling with angels as friend with friends, he had imbibed the
sublimity of their ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm
of household words. So thought the poet. And Ernest, on the other hand,
was moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out of
his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door with
shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive. The sympathies of these two men
instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained
alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music
which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor
distinguished his own share from the other’s. They led one another, as
it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and
hitherto so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so
beautiful that they desired to be there always.

As Ernest listened to the poet, he imagined that the Great Stone Face
was bending forward to listen too. He gazed earnestly into the poet’s
glowing eyes.

“Who are you, my strangely gifted guest?” he said.

The poet laid his finger on the volume that Ernest had been reading.

“You have read these poems,” said he. “You know me, then,—for I wrote
them.”

Again, and still more earnestly than before, Ernest examined the poet’s
features; then turned towards the Great Stone Face; then back, with an
uncertain aspect, to his guest. But his countenance fell; he shook his
head, and sighed.

“Wherefore are you sad?” inquired the poet.

“Because,” replied Ernest, “all through life I have awaited the
fulfilment of a prophecy; and, when I read these poems, I hoped that it
might be fulfilled in you.”

“You hoped,” answered the poet, faintly smiling, “to find in me the
likeness of the Great Stone Face. And you are disappointed, as formerly
with Mr. Gathergold, and Old Blood-and-Thunder, and Old Stony Phiz.
Yes, Ernest, it is my doom. You must add my name to the illustrious
three, and record another failure of your hopes. For—in shame and
sadness do I speak it, Ernest—I am not worthy to be typified by yonder
benign and majestic image.”

“And why?” asked Ernest. He pointed to the volume. “Are not those
thoughts divine?”

“They have a strain of the Divinity,” replied the poet. “You can hear
in them the far-off echo of a heavenly song. But my life, dear Ernest,
has not corresponded with my thought. I have had grand dreams, but they
have been only dreams, because I have lived—and that, too, by my own
choice—among poor and mean realities. Sometimes even—shall I dare to
say it?—I lack faith in the grandeur, the beauty, and the goodness,
which my own words are said to have made more evident in nature and in
human life. Why, then, pure seeker of the good and true, shouldst thou
hope to find me, in yonder image of the divine?”

The poet spoke sadly, and his eyes were dim with tears. So, likewise,
were those of Ernest.

At the hour of sunset, as had long been his frequent custom, Ernest was
to discourse to an assemblage of the neighboring inhabitants in the
open air. He and the poet, arm in arm, still talking together as they
went along, proceeded to the spot. It was a small nook among the hills,
with a gray precipice behind, the stern front of which was relieved by
the pleasant foliage of many creeping plants that made a tapestry for
the naked rock, by hanging their festoons from all its rugged angles.
At a small elevation above the ground, set in a rich framework of
verdure, there appeared a niche, spacious enough to admit a human
figure, with freedom for such gestures as spontaneously accompany
earnest thought and genuine emotion. Into this natural pulpit Ernest
ascended, and threw a look of familiar kindness around upon his
audience. They stood, or sat, or reclined upon the grass, as seemed
good to each, with the departing sunshine falling obliquely over them,
and mingling its subdued cheerfulness with the solemnity of a grove of
ancient trees, beneath and amid the boughs of which the golden rays
were constrained to pass. In another direction was seen the Great Stone
Face, with the same cheer, combined with the same solemnity, in its
benignant aspect.

Ernest began to speak, giving to the people of what was in his heart
and mind. His words had power, because they accorded with his thoughts;
and his thoughts had reality and depth, because they harmonized with
the life which he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this
preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life of good
deeds and holy love was melted into them. Pearls, pure and rich, had
been dissolved into this precious draught. The poet, as he listened,
felt that the being and character of Ernest were a nobler strain of
poetry than he had ever written. His eyes glistening with tears, he
gazed reverentially at the venerable man, and said within himself that
never was there an aspect so worthy of a prophet and a sage as that
mild, sweet, thoughtful countenance, with the glory of white hair
diffused about it. At a distance, but distinctly to be seen, high up in
the golden light of the setting sun, appeared the Great Stone Face,
with hoary mists around it, like the white hairs around the brow of
Ernest. Its look of grand beneficence seemed to embrace the world.

At that moment, in sympathy with a thought which he was about to utter,
the face of Ernest assumed a grandeur of expression, so imbued with
benevolence, that the poet, by an irresistible impulse, threw his arms
aloft and shouted, “Behold! Behold! Ernest is himself the likeness of
the Great Stone Face!”

Then all the people looked, and saw that what the deep-sighted poet
said was true. The prophecy was fulfilled. But Ernest, having finished
what he had to say, took the poet’s arm, and walked slowly homeward,
still hoping that some wiser and better man than himself would by and
by appear, bearing a resemblance to the GREAT STONE FACE.




MAIN STREET


A respectable-looking individual makes his bow and addresses the
public. In my daily walks along the principal street of my native town,
it has often occurred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward,
and the vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have passed along
this thoroughfare during the more than two centuries of its existence,
could be presented to the eye in a shifting panorama, it would be an
exceedingly effective method of illustrating the march of time. Acting
on this idea, I have contrived a certain pictorial exhibition, somewhat
in the nature of a puppet-show, by means of which I propose to call up
the multiform and many-colored Past before the spectator, and show him
the ghosts of his forefathers, amid a succession of historic incidents,
with no greater trouble than the turning of a crank. Be pleased,
therefore, my indulgent patrons, to walk into the show-room, and take
your seats before yonder mysterious curtain. The little wheels and
springs of my machinery have been well oiled; a multitude of puppets
are dressed in character, representing all varieties of fashion, from
the Puritan cloak and jerkin to the latest Oak Hall coat; the lamps are
trimmed, and shall brighten into noontide sunshine, or fade away in
moonlight, or muffle their brilliancy in a November cloud, as the
nature of the scene may require; and, in short, the exhibition is just
ready to commence. Unless something should go wrong,—as, for instance,
the misplacing of a picture, whereby the people and events of one
century might be thrust into the middle of another; or the breaking of
a wire, which would bring the course of time to a sudden
period,—barring, I say, the casualties to which such a complicated
piece of mechanism is liable,—I flatter myself, ladies and
gentlemen,—that the performance will elicit your generous approbation.

Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold—not,
indeed, the Main Street—but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over
which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.

You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive
wood,—the ever-youthful and venerably old,—verdant with new twigs, yet
hoary, as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have
accumulated upon its intermingled branches. The white man’s axe has
never smitten a single tree; his footstep has never crumpled a single
one of the withered leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have
been harvesting beneath. Yet, see! along through the vista of impending
boughs, there is already a faintly traced path, running nearly east and
west, as if a prophecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen
into the heart of the solemn old wood. Onward goes this hardly
perceptible track, now ascending over a natural swell of land, now
subsiding gently into a hollow; traversed here by a little streamlet,
which glitters like a snake through the gleam of sunshine, and quickly
hides itself among the underbrush, in its quest for the neighboring
cove; and impeded there by the massy corpse of a giant of the forest,
which had lived out its incalculable term of life, and been overthrown
by mere old age, and lies buried in the new vegetation that is born of
its decay. What footsteps can have worn this half-seen path? Hark! Do
we not hear them now rustling softly over the leaves? We discern an
Indian woman,—a majestic and queenly woman, or else her spectral image
does not represent her truly,—for this is the great Squaw Sachem, whose
rule, with that of her sons, extends from Mystic to Agawam. That red
chief, who stalks by her side, is Wappacowet, her second husband, the
priest and magician, whose incantations shall hereafter affright the
pale-faced settlers with grisly phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the
woods, at midnight. But greater would be the affright of the Indian
necromancer, if, mirrored in the pool of water at his feet, he could
catch a prophetic glimpse of the noonday marvels which the white man is
destined to achieve; if he could see, as in a dream, the stone front of
the stately hall, which will cast its shadow over this very spot; if he
could be aware that the future edifice will contain a noble Museum,
where, among countless curiosities of earth and sea, a few Indian
arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials of a vanished race!

No such forebodings disturb the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet. They pass
on, beneath the tangled shade, holding high talk on matters of state
and religion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of affairs
will endure forever. Meanwhile, how full of its own proper life is the
scene that lies around them! The gray squirrel runs up the trees, and
rustles among the upper branches. Was not that the leap of a deer? And
there is the whirr of a partridge! Methinks, too, I catch the cruel and
stealthy eye of a wolf, as he draws back into yonder impervious density
of underbrush. So, there, amid the murmur of boughs, go the Indian
queen and the Indian priest; while the gloom of the broad wilderness
impends over them, and its sombre mystery invests them as with
something preternatural; and only momentary streaks of quivering
sunlight, once in a great while, find their way down, and glimmer among
the feathers in their dusky hair. Can it be that the thronged street of
a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude,—over those soft
heaps of the decaying tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green
with water-moss, and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great
trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? It
has been a wilderness from the creation. Must it not be a wilderness
forever?

Here an acidulous-looking gentleman in blue glasses, with bows of
Berlin steel, who has taken a seat at the extremity of the front row,
begins, at this early stage of the exhibition, to criticise.

“The whole affair is a manifest catchpenny!” observes he, scarcely
under his breath. “The trees look more like weeds in a garden than a
primitive forest; the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet are stiff in their
pasteboard joints; and the squirrels, the deer, and the wolf move with
all the grace of a child’s wooden monkey, sliding up and down a stick.”

“I am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your remarks,” replies the
showman, with a bow. “Perhaps they are just. Human art has its limits,
and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator’s
imagination.”

“You will get no such aid from mine,” responds the critic. “I make it a
point to see things precisely as they are. But come! go ahead! the
stage is waiting!”

The showman proceeds.

Casting our eyes again over the scene, we perceive that strangers have
found their way into the solitary place. In more than one spot, among
the trees, an upheaved axe is glittering in the sunshine. Roger Conant,
the first settler in Naumkeag, has built his dwelling, months ago, on
the border of the forest-path; and at this moment he comes eastward
through the vista of woods, with his gun over his shoulder, bringing
home the choice portions of a deer. His stalwart figure, clad in a
leathern jerkin and breeches of the same, strides sturdily onward, with
such an air of physical force and energy that we might almost expect
the very trees to stand aside, and give him room to pass. And so,
indeed, they must; for, humble as is his name in history, Roger Conant
still is of that class of men who do not merely find, but make, their
place in the system of human affairs; a man of thoughtful strength, he
has planted the germ of a city. There stands his habitation, showing in
its rough architecture some features of the Indian wigwam, and some of
the log-cabin, and somewhat, too, of the straw-thatched cottage in Old
England, where this good yeoman had his birth and breeding. The
dwelling is surrounded by a cleared space of a few acres, where Indian
corn grows thrivingly among the stumps of the trees; while the dark
forest hems it in, and scenes to gaze silently and solemnly, as if
wondering at the breadth of sunshine which the white man spreads around
him. An Indian, half hidden in the dusky shade, is gazing and wondering
too.

Within the door of the cottage you discern the wife, with her ruddy
English cheek. She is singing, doubtless, a psalm tune, at her
household work; or, perhaps she sighs at the remembrance of the
cheerful gossip, and all the merry social life, of her native village
beyond the vast and melancholy sea. Yet the next moment she laughs,
with sympathetic glee, at the sports of her little tribe of children;
and soon turns round, with the home-look in her face, as her husband’s
foot is heard approaching the rough-hewn threshold. How sweet must it
be for those who have an Eden in their hearts, like Roger Conant and
his wife, to find a new world to project it into, as they have, instead
of dwelling among old haunts of men, where so many household fires have
been kindled and burnt out, that the very glow of happiness has
something dreary in it! Not that this pair are alone in their wild
Eden, for here comes Goodwife Massey, the young spouse of Jeffrey
Massey, from her home hard by, with an infant at her breast. Dame
Conant has another of like age; and it shall hereafter be one of the
disputed points of history which of these two babies was the first
town-born child.

But see! Roger Conant has other neighbors within view. Peter Palfrey
likewise has built himself a house, and so has Balch, and Norman, and
Woodbury. Their dwellings, indeed,—such is the ingenious contrivance of
this piece of pictorial mechanism,—seem to have arisen, at various
points of the scene, even while we have been looking at it. The
forest-track, trodden more and more by the hobnailed shoes of these
sturdy and ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinctness which it never
could have acquired from the light tread of a hundred times as many
Indian moccasins. It will be a street, anon! As we observe it now, it
goes onward from one clearing to another, here plunging into a shadowy
strip of woods, there open to the sunshine, but everywhere showing a
decided line, along which human interests have begun to hold their
career. Over yonder swampy spot, two trees have been felled, and laid
side by side to make a causeway. In another place, the axe has cleared
away a confused intricacy of fallen trees and clustered boughs, which
had been tossed together by a hurricane. So now the little children,
just beginning to run alone, may trip along the path, and not often
stumble over an impediment, unless they stray from it to gather
wood-berries beneath the trees. And, besides the feet of grown people
and children, there are the cloven hoofs of a small herd of cows, who
seek their subsistence from the native grasses, and help to deepen the
track of the future thoroughfare. Goats also browse along it, and
nibble at the twigs that thrust themselves across the way. Not seldom,
in its more secluded portions, where the black shadow of the forest
strives to hide the trace of human-footsteps, stalks a gaunt wolf, on
the watch for a kid or a young calf; or fixes his hungry gaze on the
group of children gathering berries, and can hardly forbear to rush
upon them. And the Indians, coming from their distant wigwams to view
the white man’s settlement, marvel at the deep track which he makes,
and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment that this heavy
tread will find its way over all the land; and that the wild-woods, the
wild wolf, and the wild Indian will alike be trampled beneath it. Even
so shall it be. The pavements of the Main Street must be laid over the
red man’s grave.

Behold! here is a spectacle which should be ushered in by the peal of
trumpets, if Naumkeag had ever yet heard that cheery music, and by the
roar of cannon, echoing among the woods. A procession,—for, by its
dignity, as marking an epoch in the history of the street, it deserves
that name,—a procession advances along the pathway. The good ship
Abigail has arrived from England, bringing wares and merchandise, for
the comfort of the inhabitants, and traffic with the Indians; bringing
passengers too, and, more important than all, a governor for the new
settlement. Roger Conant and Peter Palfrey, with their companions, have
been to the shore to welcome him; and now, with such honor and triumph
as their rude way of life permits, are escorting the sea-flushed
voyagers to their habitations. At the point where Endicott enters upon
the scene, two venerable trees unite their branches high above his
head; thus forming a triumphal arch of living verdure, beneath which he
pauses, with his wife leaning on his arm, to catch the first impression
of their new-found home. The old settlers gaze not less earnestly at
him, than he at the hoary woods and the rough surface of the clearings.
They like his bearded face, under the shadow of the broad-brimmed and
steeple-crowned Puritan hat;—a visage resolute, grave, and thoughtful,
yet apt to kindle with that glow of a cheerful spirit by which men of
strong character are enabled to go joyfully on their proper tasks. His
form, too, as you see it, in a doublet and hose of sad-colored cloth,
is of a manly make, fit for toil and hardship, and fit to wield the
heavy sword that hangs from his leathern belt. His aspect is a better
warrant for the ruler’s office than the parchment commission which he
bears, however fortified it may be with the broad seal of the London
council. Peter Palfrey nods to Roger Conant. “The worshipful Court of
Assistants have done wisely,” say they between themselves. “They have
chosen for our governor a man out of a thousand.” Then they toss up
their hats,—they, and all the uncouth figures of their company, most of
whom are clad in skins, inasmuch as their old kersey and linsey-woolsey
garments have been torn and tattered by many a long month’s wear,—they
all toss up their hats, and salute their new governor and captain with
a hearty English shout of welcome. We seem to hear it with our own
ears, so perfectly is the action represented in this life-like, this
almost magic picture!

But have you observed the lady who leans upon the arm of Endicott?—-a
rose of beauty from an English garden, now to be transplanted to a
fresher soil. It may be that, long years—centuries indeed—after this
fair flower shall have decayed, other flowers of the same race will
appear in the same soil, and gladden other generations with hereditary
beauty. Does not the vision haunt us yet? Has not Nature kept the mould
unbroken, deeming it a pity that the idea should vanish from mortal
sight forever, after only once assuming earthly substance? Do we not
recognize, in that fair woman’s face, a model of features which still
beam, at happy moments, on what was then the woodland pathway, but has
long since grown into a busy street?

“This is too ridiculous!—positively insufferable!” mutters the same
critic who had before expressed his disapprobation. “Here is a
pasteboard figure, such as a child would cut out of a card, with a pair
of very dull scissors; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it
the prototype of hereditary beauty!”

“But, sir, you have not the proper point of view,” remarks the showman.
“You sit altogether too near to get the best effect of my pictorial
exhibition. Pray, oblige me by removing to this other bench, and I
venture to assure you the proper light and shadow will transform the
spectacle into quite another thing.”

“Pshaw!” replies the critic; “I want no other light and shade. I have
already told you that it is my business to see things just as they
are.”

“I would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibition,” observes
a gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much interested,—“I
would suggest that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor Endicott, and
who came with him from England, left no posterity; and that,
consequently, we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any
specimens of feminine loveliness now extant among us.”

Having nothing to allege against this genealogical objection, the
showman points again to the scene.

During this little interruption, you perceive that the Anglo-Saxon
energy—as the phrase now goes—has been at work in the spectacle before
us. So many chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to have
the aspect of a village street; although everything is so inartificial
and inceptive, that it seems as if one returning wave of the wild
nature might overwhelm it all. But the one edifice which gives the
pledge of permanence to this bold enterprise is seen at the central
point of the picture. There stands the meeting-house, a small
structure, low-roofed, without a spire, and built of rough timber,
newly hewn, with the sap still in the logs, and here and there a strip
of bark adhering to them. A meaner temple was never consecrated to the
worship of the Deity. With the alternative of kneeling beneath the
awful vault of the firmament, it is strange that men should creep into
this pent-up nook, and expect God’s presence there. Such, at least, one
would imagine, might be the feeling of these forest-settlers,
accustomed, as they had been, to stand under the dim arches of vast
cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary worship in the old
ivy-covered churches of rural England, around which lay the bones of
many generations of their forefathers. How could they dispense with the
carved altar-work?—how, with the pictured windows, where the light of
common day was hallowed by being transmitted through the glorified
figures of saints?—how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it must have
been, with the prayers that had gone upward for centuries?—how, with
the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along the aisles, pervading
the whole church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of audible
religion? They needed nothing of all this. Their house of worship, like
their ceremonial, was naked, simple, and severe. But the zeal of a
recovered faith burned like a lamp within their hearts, enriching
everything around them with its radiance; making of these new walls,
and this narrow compass, its own cathedral; and being, in itself, that
spiritual mystery and experience, of which sacred architecture,
pictured windows, and the organ’s grand solemnity are remote and
imperfect symbols. All was well, so long as their lamps were freshly
kindled at heavenly flame. After a while, however, whether in their
time or their children’s, these lamps began to burn more dimly, or with
a less genuine lustre; and then it might be seen how hard, cold, and
confined was their system,—how like an iron cage was that which they
called Liberty.

Too much of this. Look again at the picture, and observe how the
aforesaid Anglo-Saxon energy is now trampling along the street, and
raising a positive cloud of dust beneath its sturdy footsteps. For
there the carpenters are building a new house, the frame of which was
hewn and fitted in England, of English oak, and sent hither on
shipboard; and here a blacksmith makes huge slang and clatter on his
anvil, shaping out tools and weapons; and yonder a wheelwright, who
boasts himself a London workman, regularly bred to his handicraft, is
fashioning a set of wagon-wheels, the track of which shall soon be
visible. The wild forest is shrinking back; the street has lost the
aromatic odor of the pine-trees, and of the sweet-fern that grew
beneath them. The tender and modest wild-flowers, those gentle children
of savage nature that grew pale beneath the ever-brooding shade, have
shrank away and disappeared, like stars that vanish in the breadth of
light. Gardens are fenced in, and display pumpkin-beds and rows of
cabbages and beans; and, though the governor and the minister both view
them with a disapproving eye, plants of broad-leaved tobacco, which the
cultivators are enjoined to use privily, or not at all. No wolf, for a
year past, has been heard to bark, or known to range among the
dwellings, except that single one, whose grisly head, with a plash of
blood beneath it, is now affixed to the portal of the meeting-house.
The partridge has ceased to run across the too-frequented path. Of all
the wild life that used to throng here, only the Indians still come
into the settlement, bringing the skins of beaver and otter, bear and
elk, which they sell to Endicott for the wares of England. And there is
little John Massey, the son of Jeffrey Massey and first-born of
Naumkeag, playing beside his father’s threshold, a child of six or
seven years old. Which is the better-grown infant,—the town or the boy?

The red men have become aware that the street is no longer free to
them, save by the sufferance and permission of the settlers. Often, to
impress them with an awe of English power, there is a muster and
training of the town-forces, and a stately march of the mail-clad band,
like this which we now see advancing up the street. There they come,
fifty of them, or more; all with their iron breastplates and steel caps
well burnished, and glimmering bravely against the sun; their ponderous
muskets on their shoulders, their bandaliers about their waists, their
lighted matches in their hands, and the drum and fife playing cheerily
before them. See! do they not step like martial men? Do they not
manœuvre like soldiers who have seen stricken fields? And well they
may; for this band is composed of precisely such materials as those
with which Cromwell is preparing to beat down the strength of a
kingdom; and his famous regiment of Ironsides might be recruited from
just such men. In everything, at this period, New England was the
essential spirit and flower of that which was about to become uppermost
in the mother-country. Many a bold and wise man lost the fame which
would have accrued to him in English history, by crossing the Atlantic
with our forefathers. Many a valiant captain, who might have been
foremost at Marston Moor or Naseby, exhausted his martial ardor in the
command of a log-built fortress, like that which you observe on the
gently rising ground at the right of the pathway,—its banner fluttering
in the breeze, and the culverins and sakers showing their deadly
muzzles over the rampart.

A multitude of people were now thronging to New England: some, because
the ancient and ponderous framework of Church and State threatened to
crumble down upon their heads; others, because they despaired of such a
downfall. Among those who came to Naumkeag were men of history and
legend, whose feet leave a track of brightness along any pathway which
they have trodden. You shall behold their life-like images—their
spectres, if you choose so to call them—passing, encountering with a
familiar nod, stopping to converse together, praying, bearing weapons,
laboring or resting from their labors, in the Main Street. Here, now,
comes Hugh Peters, an earnest, restless man, walking swiftly, as being
impelled by that fiery activity of nature which shall hereafter thrust
him into the conflict of dangerous affairs, make him the chaplain and
counsellor of Cromwell, and finally bring him to a bloody end. He
pauses, by the meetinghouse, to exchange a greeting with Roger
Williams, whose face indicates, methinks, a gentler spirit, kinder and
more expansive, than that of Peters; yet not less active for what he
discerns to be the will of God, or the welfare of mankind. And look!
here is a guest for Endicott, coming forth out of the forest, through
which he has been journeying from Boston, and which, with its rude
branches, has caught hold of his attire, and has wet his feet with its
swamps and streams. Still there is something in his mild and venerable,
though not aged presence—a propriety, an equilibrium, in Governor
Winthrop’s nature—that causes the disarray of his costume to be
unnoticed, and gives us the same impression as if he were clad in such
rave and rich attire as we may suppose him to have worn in the Council
Chamber of the colony. Is not this characteristic wonderfully
perceptible in our spectral representative of his person? But what
dignitary is this crossing from the other side to greet the governor? A
stately personage, in a dark velvet cloak, with a hoary beard, and a
gold chain across his breast; he has the authoritative port of one who
has filled the highest civic station in the first of cities. Of all men
in the world, we should least expect to meet the Lord Mayor of
London—as Sir Richard Saltonstall has been, once and again—in a
forest-bordered settlement of the western wilderness.

Farther down the street, we see Emanuel Downing, a grave and worthy
citizen, with his son George, a stripling who has a career before him;
his shrewd and quick capacity and pliant conscience shall not only
exalt him high, but secure him from a downfall. Here is another figure,
on whose characteristic make and expressive action I will stake the
credit of my pictorial puppet-show.

Have you not already detected a quaint, sly humor in that face,—an
eccentricity in the manner,—a certain indescribable waywardness,—all
the marks, in short, of an original man, unmistakably impressed, yet
kept down by a sense of clerical restraint? That is Nathaniel Ward, the
minister of Ipswich, but better remembered as the simple cobbler of
Agawam. He hammered his sole so faithfully, and stitched his
upper-leather so well, that the shoe is hardly yet worn out, though
thrown aside for some two centuries past. And next, among these
Puritans and Roundheads, we observe the very model of a Cavalier, with
the curling lovelock, the fantastically trimmed beard, the embroidery,
the ornamented rapier, the gilded dagger, and all other foppishnesses
that distinguished the wild gallants who rode headlong to their
overthrow in the cause of King Charles. This is Morton of Merry Mount,
who has come hither to hold a council with Endicott, but will shortly
be his prisoner. Yonder pale, decaying figure of a white-robed woman,
who glides slowly along the street, is the Lady Arabella, looking for
her own grave in the virgin soil. That other female form, who seems to
be talking—we might almost say preaching or expounding—in the centre of
a group of profoundly attentive auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here
comes Vane—

“But, my dear sir,” interrupts the same gentleman who before questioned
the showman’s genealogical accuracy, “allow me to observe that these
historical personages could not possibly have met together in the Main
Street. They might, and probably did, all visit our old town, at one
time or another, but not simultaneously; and you have fallen into
anachronisms that I positively shudder to think of!”

“The fellow,” adds the scarcely civil critic, “has learned a bead-roll
of historic names, whom he lugs into his pictorial puppet-show, as he
calls it, helter-skelter, without caring whether they were
contemporaries or not,—and sets them all by the ears together. But was
there ever such a fund of impudence? To hear his running commentary,
you would suppose that these miserable slips of painted pasteboard,
with hardly the remotest outlines of the human figure, had all the
character and expression of Michael Angelo’s pictures. Well! go on,
sir!”

“Sir, you break the illusion of the scene,” mildly remonstrates the
showman.

“Illusion! What illusion?” rejoins the critic, with a contemptuous
snort. “On the word of a gentleman, I see nothing illusive in the
wretchedly bedaubed sheet of canvas that forms your background, or in
these pasteboard slips that hitch and jerk along the front. The only
illusion, permit me to say, is in the puppet-showman’s tongue,—and that
but a wretched one, into the bargain!”

“We public men,” replies the showman, meekly, “must lay our account,
sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism. But—merely for
your own pleasure, sir—let me entreat you to take another point of
view. Sit farther back, by that young lady, in whose face I have
watched the reflection of every changing scene; only oblige me by
sitting there; and, take my word for it, the slips of pasteboard shall
assume spiritual life, and the bedaubed canvas become an airy and
changeable reflex of what it purports to represent.”

“I know better,” retorts the critic, settling himself in his seat, with
sullen but self-complacent immovableness. “And, as for my own pleasure,
I shall best consult it by remaining precisely where I am.”

The showman bows, and waves his hand; and, at the signal, as if time
and vicissitude had been awaiting his permission to move onward, the
mimic street becomes alive again.

Years have rolled over our scene, and converted the forest-track into a
dusty thoroughfare, which, being intersected with lanes and
cross-paths, may fairly be designated as the Main Street. On the
ground-sites of many of the log-built sheds, into which the first
settlers crept for shelter, houses of quaint architecture have now
risen. These later edifices are built, as you see, in one generally
accordant style, though with such subordinate variety as keeps the
beholder’s curiosity excited, and causes each structure, like its
owner’s character, to produce its own peculiar impression. Most of them
have a huge chimney in the centre, with flues so vast that it must have
been easy for the witches to fly out of them as they were wont to do,
when bound on an aerial visit to the Black Man in the forest. Around
this great chimney the wooden house clusters itself, in a whole
community of gable-ends, each ascending into its own separate peak; the
second story, with its lattice-windows, projecting over the first; and
the door, which is perhaps arched, provided on the outside with an iron
hammer, wherewith the visitor’s hand may give a thundering rat-a-tat.

The timber framework of these houses, as compared with those of recent
date, is like the skeleton of an old giant, beside the frail bones of a
modern man of fashion. Many of them, by the vast strength and soundness
of their oaken substance, have been preserved through a length of time
which would have tried the stability of brick and stone; so that, in
all the progressive decay and continual reconstruction of the street,
to down our own days, we shall still behold these old edifices
occupying their long-accustomed sites. For instance, on the upper
corner of that green lane which shall hereafter be North Street, we see
the Curwen House, newly built, with the carpenters still at work on the
roof nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner
stands another dwelling,—destined, at some period of its existence, to
be the abode of an unsuccessful alchemist,—which shall likewise survive
to our own generation, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through the
medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now established a sort of
kindred and hereditary acquaintance with the Main Street.

Great as is the transformation produced by a short term of years, each
single day creeps through the Puritan settlement sluggishly enough. It
shall pass before your eyes, condensed into the space of a few moments.
The gray light of early morning is slowly diffusing itself over the
scene; and the bellman, whose office it is to cry the hour at the
street-corners, rings the last peal upon his hand bell, and goes
wearily homewards, with the owls, the bats, and other creatures of the
night. Lattices are thrust back on their hinges, as if the town were
opening its eyes, in the summer morning. Forth stumbles the still
drowsy cowherd, with his horn; putting which to his lips, it emits a
bellowing bray, impossible to be represented in the picture, but which
reaches the pricked-up ears of every cow in the settlement, and tells
her that the dewy pasture-hour is come. House after house awakes, and
sends the smoke up curling from its chimney, like frosty breath from
living nostrils; and as those white wreaths of smoke, though
impregnated with earthy admixtures, climb skyward, so, from each
dwelling, does the morning worship—its spiritual essence, bearing up
its human imperfection—find its way to the heavenly Father’s throne.

The breakfast-hour being passed, the inhabitants do not, as usual, go
to their fields or workshops, but remain within doors; or perhaps walk
the street, with a grave sobriety, yet a disengaged and unburdened
aspect, that belongs neither to a holiday nor a Sabbath. And, indeed,
this passing day is neither, nor is it a common week-day, although
partaking of all the three. It is the Thursday Lecture; an institution
which New England has long ago relinquished, and almost forgotten, yet
which it would have been better to retain, as bearing relations to both
the spiritual and ordinary life, and bringing each acquainted with the
other. The tokens of its observance, however, which here meet our eyes,
are of rather a questionable cast. It is, in one sense, a day of public
shame; the day on which transgressors, who have made themselves liable
to the minor severities of the Puritan law receive their reward of
ignominy. At this very moment, this constable has bound an idle fellow
to the whipping-post, and is giving him his deserts with a cat-o’-nine
tails. Ever since sunrise, Daniel Fairfield has been standing on the
steps of the meeting-house, with a halter about his neck, which he is
condemned to wear visibly throughout his lifetime; Dorothy Talby is
chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun
blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting
her hand against her husband; while, through the bars of that great
wooden cage, in the centre of the scene, we discern either a human
being or a wild beast, or both in one, whom this public infamy causes
to roar, and gnash his teeth, and shake the strong oaken bars, as if he
would break forth, and tear in pieces the little children who have been
peeping at him. Such are the profitable sights that serve the good
people to while away the earlier part of lecture-day. Betimes in the
forenoon, a traveller—the first traveller that has come hitherward this
morning—rides slowly into the street on his patient steed. He seems a
clergyman; and, as he draws near, we recognize the minister of Lynn,
who was pre-engaged to lecture here, and has been revolving his
discourse, as he rode through the hoary wilderness. Behold, now, the
whole town thronging into the meeting-house, mostly with such sombre
visages that the sunshine becomes little better than a shadow when it
falls upon them. There go the Thirteen Men, grim rulers of a grim
community! There goes John Massey, the first town-born child, now a
youth of twenty, whose eye wanders with peculiar interest towards that
buxom damsel who comes up the steps at the same instant. There hobbles
Goody Foster, a sour and bitter old beldam, looking as if she went to
curse, and not to pray, and whom many of her neighbors suspect of
taking an occasional airing on a broomstick. There, too, slinking
shamefacedly in, you observe that same poor do-nothing and
good-for-nothing whom we saw castigated just now at the whipping-post.
Last of all, there goes the tithing-man, lugging in a couple of small
boys, whom he has caught at play beneath God’s blessed sunshine, in a
back lane. What native of Naumkeag, whose recollections go back more
than thirty years, does not still shudder at that dark ogre of his
infancy, who perhaps had long ceased to have an actual existence, but
still lived in his childish belief, in a horrible idea, and in the
nurse’s threat, as the Tidy Man!

It will be hardly worth our while to wait two, or it may be three,
turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion of the lecture.
Therefore, by my control over light and darkness, I cause the dusk, and
then the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth
again the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his
footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily
the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears. Happy are we, if for nothing else,
yet because we did not live in those days. In truth, when the first
novelty and stir of spirit had subsided,—when the new settlement,
between the forest-border and the sea, had become actually a little
town,—its daily life must have trudged onward with hardly anything to
diversify and enliven it, while also its rigidity could not fail to
cause miserable distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was
sinister to the intellect, and sinister to the heart; especially when
one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom, and the counterfeit
of its religious ardor, to the next; for these characteristics, as was
inevitable, assumed the form both of hypocrisy and exaggeration, by
being inherited from the example and precept of other human beings, and
not from an original and spiritual source. The sons and grandchildren
of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than
their progenitors had been. The latter were stern, severe, intolerant,
but not superstitious, not even fanatical; and endowed, if any men of
that age were, with a far-seeing worldly sagacity. But it was
impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, in heaven’s freedom,
beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of character had
established; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the
unfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to
us by our Puritan forefathers. Let us thank God for having given us
such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less
fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.

“What is all this?” cries the critic. “A sermon? If so, it is not in
the bill.”

“Very true,” replies the showman; “and I ask pardon of the audience.”

Look now at the street, and observe a strange people entering it. Their
garments are torn and disordered, their faces haggard, their figures
emaciated; for they have made their way hither through pathless
deserts, suffering hunger and hardship, with no other shelter thin a
hollow tree, the lair of a wild beast, or an Indian wigwam. Nor, in the
most inhospitable and dangerous of such lodging-places, was there half
the peril that awaits them in this thoroughfare of Christian men, with
those secure dwellings and warm hearths on either side of it, and
yonder meeting-house as the central object of the scene. These
wanderers have received from Heaven a gift that, in all epochs of the
world, has brought with it the penalties of mortal suffering and
persecution, scorn, enmity, and death itself;—a gift that, thus
terrible to its possessors, has ever been most hateful to all other
men, since its very existence seems to threaten the overthrow of
whatever else the toilsome ages have built up;—the gift of a new idea.
You can discern it in them, illuminating their faces—their whole
persons, indeed, however earthly and cloddish—with a light that
inevitably shines through, and makes the startled community aware that
these men are not as they themselves are,—not brethren nor neighbors of
their thought. Forthwith, it is as if an earthquake rumbled through the
town, making its vibrations felt at every hearthstone, and especially
causing the spire of the meeting-house to totter. The Quakers have
come. We are in peril! See! they trample upon our wise and
well-established laws in the person of our chief magistrate; for
Governor Endicott is passing, now an aged man, and dignified with long
habits of authority,—and not one of the irreverent vagabonds has moved
his hat. Did you note the ominous frown of the white-bearded Puritan
governor, as he turned himself about, and, in his anger, half uplifted
the staff that has become a needful support to his old age? Here comes
old Mr. Norris, our venerable minister. Will they doff their hats, and
pay reverence to him? No: their hats stick fast to their ungracious
heads, as if they grew there; and—impious varlets that they are, and
worse than the heathen Indians!—they eye our reverend pastor with a
peculiar scorn, distrust, unbelief, and utter denial of his sanctified
pretensions, of which he himself immediately becomes conscious; the
more bitterly conscious, as he never knew nor dreamed of the like
before.

But look yonder! Can we believe our eyes? A Quaker woman, clad in
sackcloth, and with ashes on her head, has mounted the steps of the
meeting-house. She addresses the people in a wild, shrill voice,—wild
and shrill it must be to suit such a figure,—which makes them tremble
and turn pale, although they crowd open-mouthed to hear her. She is
bold against established authority; she denounces the priest and his
steeple-house. Many of her hearers are appalled; some weep; and others
listen with a rapt attention, as if a living truth had now, for the
first time, forced its way through the crust of habit, reached their
hearts, and awakened them to life. This matter must be looked to; else
we have brought our faith across the seas with us in vain; and it had
been better that the old forest were still standing here, waving its
tangled boughs and murmuring to the sky out of its desolate recesses,
instead of this goodly street, if such blasphemies be spoken in it.

So thought the old Puritans. What was their mode of action may be
partly judged from the spectacles which now pass before your eyes.
Joshua Buffum is standing in the pillory. Cassandra Southwick is led to
prison. And there a woman, it is Ann Coleman,—naked from the waist
upward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the Main
Street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a
whip of knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is that constable; and
each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you see a frown
wrinkling and twisting his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon
his lips. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts
his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfil the injunction of Major
Hawthorne’s warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. There came down a
stroke that has drawn blood! Ten such stripes are to be given in Salem,
ten in Boston, and ten in Dedham; and, with those thirty stripes of
blood upon her, she is to be driven into the forest. The crimson trail
goes wavering along the Main Street; but Heaven grant that, as the rain
of so many years has wept upon it, time after time, and washed it all
away, so there may have been a dew of mercy, to cleanse this cruel
blood-stain out of the record of the persecutor’s life!

Pass on, thou spectral constable, and betake thee to thine own place of
torment. Meanwhile, by the silent operation of the mechanism behind the
scenes, a considerable space of time would seem to have lapsed over the
street. The older dwellings now begin to look weather-beaten, through
the effect of the many eastern storms that have moistened their
unpainted shingles and clapboards, for not less than forty years. Such
is the age we would assign to the town, judging by the aspect of John
Massey, the first town-born child, whom his neighbors now call Goodman
Massey, and whom we see yonder, a grave, almost autumnal-looking man,
with children of his own about him. To the patriarchs of the
settlement, no doubt, the Main Street is still but an affair of
yesterday, hardly more antique, even if destined to be more permanent,
than a path shovelled through the snow. But to the middle-aged and
elderly men who came hither in childhood or early youth, it presents
the aspect of a long and well-established work, on which they have
expended the strength and ardor of their life. And the younger people,
native to the street, whose earliest recollections are of creeping over
the paternal threshold, and rolling on the grassy margin of the track,
look at it as one of the perdurable things of our mortal state,—as old
as the hills of the great pasture, or the headland at the harbor’s
mouth. Their fathers and grandsires tell them how, within a few years
past, the forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its
tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their
conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main Street is a street indeed,
worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities
beyond the sea. The old Puritans tell them of the crowds that hurry
along Cheapside and Fleet Street and the Strand, and of the rush of
tumultuous life at Temple Bar. They describe London Bridge, itself a
street, with a row of houses on each side. They speak of the vast
structure of the Tower, and the solemn grandeur of Westminster Abbey.
The children listen, and still inquire if the streets of London are
longer and broader than the one before their father’s door; if the
Tower is bigger than the jail in Prison Lane; if the old Abbey will
hold a larger congregation than our meeting-house. Nothing impresses
them, except their own experience.

It seems all a fable, too, that wolves have ever prowled here; and not
less so, that the Squaw Sachem, and the Sagamore her son, once ruled
over this region, and treated as sovereign potentates with the English
settlers, then so few and storm-beaten, now so powerful. There stand
some school-boys, you observe, in a little group around a drunken
Indian, himself a prince of the Squaw Sachem’s lineage. He brought
hither some beaver-skins for sale, and has already swallowed the larger
portion of their price, in deadly draughts of firewater. Is there not a
touch of pathos in that picture? and does it not go far towards telling
the whole story of the vast growth and prosperity of one race, and the
fated decay of another?—the children of the stranger making game of the
great Squaw Sachem’s grandson!

But the whole race of red men have not vanished with that wild princess
and her posterity. This march of soldiers along the street betokens the
breaking out of King Philip’s war; and these young men, the flower of
Essex, are on their way to defend the villages on the Connecticut;
where, at Bloody Brook, a terrible blow shall be smitten, and hardly
one of that gallant band be left alive. And there, at that stately
mansion, with its three peaks in front, and its two little peaked
towers, one on either side of the door, we see brave Captain Gardner
issuing forth, clad in his embroidered buff-coat, and his plumed cap
upon his head. His trusty sword, in its steel scabbard, strikes
clanking on the doorstep. See how the people throng to their doors and
windows, as the cavalier rides past, reining his mettled steed so
gallantly, and looking so like the very soul and emblem of martial
achievement,—destined, too, to meet a warrior’s fate, at the desperate
assault on the fortress of the Narragansetts!

“The mettled steed looks like a pig,” interrupts the critic, “and
Captain Gardner himself like the Devil, though a very tame one, and on
a most diminutive scale.”

“Sir, sir!” cries the persecuted showman, losing all patience,—for,
indeed, he had particularly prided himself on these figures of Captain
Gardner and his horse,—“I see that there is no hope of pleasing you.
Pray, sir, do me the favor to take back your money, and withdraw!”

“Not I!” answers the unconscionable critic. “I am just beginning to get
interested in the matter. Come! turn your crank, and grind out a few
more of these fooleries!”

The showman rubs his brow impulsively, whisks the little rod with which
he points out the notabilities of the scene, but, finally, with the
inevitable acquiescence of all public servants, resumes his composure
and goes on.

Pass onward, onward, Time! Build up new houses here, and tear down thy
works of yesterday, that have already the rusty moss upon them! Summon
forth the minister to the abode of the young maiden, and bid him unite
her to the joyful bridegroom! Let the youthful parents carry their
first-born to the meeting-house, to receive the baptismal rite! Knock
at the door, whence the sable line of the funeral is next to issue!
Provide other successive generations of men, to trade, talk, quarrel,
or walk in friendly intercourse along the street, as their fathers did
before them! Do all thy daily and accustomed business, Father Time, in
this thoroughfare, which thy footsteps, for so many years, have now
made dusty! But here, at last, thou leadest along a procession which,
once witnessed, shall appear no more, and be remembered only as a
hideous dream of thine, or a frenzy of thy old brain.

“Turn your crank, I say,” bellows the remorseless critic, “and grind it
out, whatever it be, without further preface!”

The showman deems it best to comply.

Then, here comes the worshipful Captain Curwen, sheriff of Essex, on
horseback, at the head of an armed guard, escorting a company of
condemned prisoners from the jail to their place of execution on
Gallows Hill. The witches! There is no mistaking them! The witches! As
they approach up Prison Lane, and turn into the Main Street, let us
watch their faces, as if we made a part of the pale crowd that presses
so eagerly about them, yet shrinks back with such shuddering dread,
leaving an open passage betwixt a dense throng on either side. Listen
to what the people say.

There is old George Jacobs, known hereabouts, these sixty years, as a
man whom we thought upright in all his way of life, quiet, blameless, a
good husband before his pious wife was summoned from the evil to come,
and a good father to the children whom she left him. Ah! but when that
blessed woman went to heaven, George Jacobs’s heart was empty, his
hearth lonely, his life broken tip; his children were married, and
betook themselves to habitations of their own; and Satan, in his
wanderings up and down, beheld this forlorn old man, to whom life was a
sameness and a weariness, and found the way to tempt him. So the
miserable sinner was prevailed with to mount into the air, and career
among the clouds; and he is proved to have been present at a
witch-meeting as far off as Falmouth, on the very same night that his
next neighbors saw him, with his rheumatic stoop, going in at his own
door. There is John Willard, too; an honest man we thought him, and so
shrewd and active in his business, so practical, so intent on every-day
affairs, so constant at his little place of trade, where he bartered
English goods for Indian corn and all kinds of country produce! How
could such a man find time, or what could put it into his mind, to
leave his proper calling, and become a wizard? It is a mystery, unless
the Black Man tempted him with great heaps of gold. See that aged
couple,—a sad sight, truly,—John Proctor, and his wife Elizabeth. If
there were two old people in all the county of Essex who seemed to have
led a true Christian life, and to be treading hopefully the little
remnant of their earthly path, it was this very pair. Yet have we heard
it sworn, to the satisfaction of the worshipful Chief-Justice Sewell,
and all the court and jury, that Proctor and his wife have shown their
withered faces at children’s bedsides, mocking, making mouths, and
affrighting the poor little innocents in the night-time. They, or their
spectral appearances, have stuck pins into the Afflicted Ones, and
thrown them into deadly fainting-fits with a touch, or but a look. And,
while we supposed the old man to be reading the Bible to his old
wife,—she meanwhile knitting in the chimney-corner,—the pair of hoary
reprobates have whisked up the chimney, both on one broomstick, and
flown away to a witch-communion, far into the depths of the chill, dark
forest. How foolish! Were it only for fear of rheumatic pains in their
old bones, they had better have stayed at home. But away they went; and
the laughter of their decayed, cackling voices has been heard at
midnight, aloft in the air. Now, in the sunny noontide, as they go
tottering to the gallows, it is the Devil’s turn to laugh.

Behind these two,—who help another along, and seem to be comforting and
encouraging each other, in a manner truly pitiful, if it were not a sin
to pity the old witch and wizard,—behind them comes a woman, with a
dark proud face that has been beautiful, and a figure that is still
majestic. Do you know her? It is Martha Carrier, whom the Devil found
in a humble cottage, and looked into her discontented heart, and saw
pride there, and tempted her with his promise that she should be Queen
of Hell. And now, with that lofty demeanor, she is passing to her
kingdom, and, by her unquenchable pride, transforms this escort of
shame into a triumphal procession, that shall attend her to the gates
of her infernal palace, and seat her upon the fiery throne. Within this
hour, she shall assume her royal dignity.

Last of the miserable train comes a man clad in black, of small stature
and a dark complexion, with a clerical band about his neck. Many a
time, in the years gone by, that face has been uplifted heavenward from
the pulpit of the East Meeting-House, when the Rev. Mr. Burroughs
seemed to worship God. What!—he? The holy man!—the learned!—the wise!
How has the Devil tempted him? His fellow-criminals, for the most part,
are obtuse, uncultivated creatures, some of them scarcely half-witted
by nature, and others greatly decayed in their intellects through age.
They were an easy prey for the destroyer. Not so with this George
Burroughs, as we judge by the inward light which glows through his dark
countenance, and, we might almost say, glorifies his figure, in spite
of the soil and haggardness of long imprisonment,—in spite of the heavy
shadow that must fall on him, while death is walking by his side. What
bribe could Satan offer, rich enough to tempt and overcome this mail?
Alas! it may have been in the very strength of his high and searching
intellect, that the Tempter found the weakness which betrayed him. He
yearned for knowledge he went groping onward into a world of mystery;
at first, as the witnesses have sworn, he summoned up the ghosts of his
two dead wives, and talked with them of matters beyond the grave; and,
when their responses failed to satisfy the intense and sinful craving
of his spirit, he called on Satan, and was heard. Yet—to look at
him—who, that had not known the proof, could believe him guilty? Who
would not say, while we see him offering comfort to the weak and aged
partners of his horrible crime,—while we hear his ejaculations of
prayer, that seem to bubble up out of the depths of his heart, and fly
heavenward, unawares,—while we behold a radiance brightening on his
features as from the other world, which is but a few steps off,—who
would not say, that, over the dusty track of the Main Street, a
Christian saint is now going to a martyr’s death? May not the
Arch-Fiend have been too subtle for the court and jury, and betrayed
them—laughing in his sleeve, the while—into the awful error of pouring
out sanctified blood as an acceptable sacrifice upon God’s altar? Ah!
no; for listen to wise Cotton Mather, who, as he sits there on his
horse, speaks comfortably to the perplexed multitude, and tells them
that all has been religiously and justly done, and that Satan’s power
shall this day receive its death-blow in New England.

Heaven grant it be so!—the great scholar must be right; so lead the
poor creatures to their death! Do you see that group of children and
half-grown girls, and, among them, an old, hag-like Indian woman,
Tituba by name? Those are the Afflicted Ones. Behold, at this very
instant, a proof of Satan’s power and malice! Mercy Parris, the
minister’s daughter, has been smitten by a flash of Martha Carrier’s
eye, and falls down in the street, writhing with horrible spasms and
foaming at the mouth, like the possessed one spoken of in Scripture.
Hurry on the accursed witches to the gallows, ere they do more
mischief!—ere they fling out their withered arms, and scatter
pestilence by handfuls among the crowd!—ere, as their parting legacy,
they cast a blight over the land, so that henceforth it may bear no
fruit nor blade of grass, and be fit for nothing but a sepulchre for
their unhallowed carcasses! So, on they go; and old George Jacobs has
stumbled, by reason of his infirmity; but Goodman Proctor and his wife
lean on one another, and walk at a reasonably steady pace, considering
their age. Mr. Burroughs seems to administer counsel to Martha Carrier,
whose face and mien, methinks, are milder and humbler than they were.
Among the multitude, meanwhile, there is horror, fear, and distrust;
and friend looks askance at friend, and the husband at his wife, and
the wife at him, and even the mother at her little child; as if, in
every creature that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an
accuser. Never, never again, whether in this or any other shape, may
Universal Madness riot in the Main Street!

I perceive in your eyes, my indulgent spectators, the criticism which
you are too kind to utter. These scenes, you think, are all too sombre.
So, indeed, they are; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of
our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread
of rose-color or gold, and not on me, who have a tropic-love of
sunshine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where
to find so much. That you may believe me, I will exhibit one of the
only class of scenes, so far as my investigation has taught me, in
which our ancestors were wont to steep their tough old hearts in wine
and strong drink, and indulge an outbreak of grisly jollity.

Here it comes, out of the same house whence we saw brave Captain
Gardner go forth to the wars. What! A coffin, borne on men’s shoulders,
and six aged gentlemen as pall-bearers, and a long train of mourners,
with black gloves and black hat-bands, and everything black, save a
white handkerchief in each mourner’s hand, to wipe away his tears
withal. Now, my kind patrons, you are angry with me. You were bidden to
a bridal-dance, and find yourselves walking in a funeral procession.
Even so; but look back through all the social customs of New England,
in the first century of her existence, and read all her traits of
character; and if you find one occasion, other than a funeral feast,
where jollity was sanctioned by universal practice, I will set fire to
my puppet-show without another word. These are the obsequies of old
Governor Bradstreet, the patriarch and survivor of the first settlers,
who, having intermarried with the Widow Gardner, is now resting from
his labors, at the great age of ninety-four. The white-bearded corpse,
which was his spirit’s earthly garniture, now lies beneath yonder
coffin-lid. Many a cask of ale and cider is on tap, and many a draught
of spiced wine and aqua-vitæ has been quaffed. Else why should the
bearers stagger, as they tremulously uphold the coffin?—and the aged
pall-bearers, too, as they strive to walk solemnly beside it?—and
wherefore do the mourners tread on one another’s heels?—and why, if we
may ask without offence, should the nose of the Rev. Mr. Noyes, through
which he has just been delivering the funeral discourse, glow like a
ruddy coal of fire? Well, well, old friends! Pass on, with your burden
of mortality, And lay it in the tomb with jolly hearts. People should
be permitted to enjoy themselves in their own fashion; every man to his
taste; but New England must have been a dismal abode for the man of
pleasure, when the only boon-companion was Death!

Under cover of a mist that has settled over the scene, a few years flit
by, and escape our notice. As the atmosphere becomes transparent, we
perceive a decrepit grandsire, hobbling along the street. Do you
recognize him? We saw him, first, as the baby in Goodwife Massey’s
arms, when the primeval trees were flinging their shadow over Roger
Conant’s cabin; we have seen him, as the boy, the youth, the man,
bearing his humble part in all the successive scenes, and forming the
index-figure whereby to note the age of his coeval town. And here he
is, old Goodman Massey, taking his last walk,—often pausing,—often
leaning over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at
such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of
those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and
deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic
infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to
visit every settler’s door. The Main Street is still youthful; the
coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of
fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our local
history, as the first town-born child.

Behold here a change, wrought in the twinkling of an eye, like an
incident in a tale of magic, even while your observation has been fixed
upon the scene. The Main Street has vanished out of sight. In its stead
appears a wintry waste of snow, with the sun just peeping over it, cold
and bright, and tingeing the white expanse with the faintest and most
ethereal rose-color. This is the Great Snow of 1717, famous for the
mountain-drifts in which it buried the whole country. It would seem as
if the street, the growth of which we have noted so attentively,
following it from its first phase, as an Indian track, until it reached
the dignity of sidewalks, were all at once obliterated, and resolved
into a drearier pathlessness than when the forest covered it. The
gigantic swells and billows of the snow have swept over each man’s
metes and bounds, and annihilated all the visible distinctions of human
property. So that now the traces of former times and hitherto
accomplished deeds being done away, mankind should be at liberty to
enter on new paths, and guide themselves by other laws than heretofore;
if, indeed, the race be not extinct, and it be worth our while to go on
with the march of life, over the cold and desolate expanse that lies
before us. It may be, however, that matters are not so desperate as
they appear. That vast icicle, glittering so cheerlessly in the
sunshine, must be the spire of the meeting-house, incrusted with frozen
sleet. Those great heaps, too, which we mistook for drifts, are houses,
buried up to their eaves, and with their peaked roofs rounded by the
depth of snow upon them. There, now, comes a gush of smoke from what I
judge to be the chimney of the Ship Tavern;—and another—another—and
another—from the chimneys of other dwellings, where fireside comfort,
domestic peace, the sports of children, and the quietude of age are
living yet, in spite of the frozen crust above them.

But it is time to change the scene. Its dreary monotony shall not test
your fortitude like one of our actual New England winters, which leaves
so large a blank—so melancholy a death-spot—in lives so brief that they
ought to be all summer-time. Here, at least, I may claim to be ruler of
the seasons. One turn of the crank shall melt away the snow from the
Main Street, and show the trees in their full foliage, the rose-bushes
in bloom, and a border of green grass along the sidewalk. There! But
what! How! The scene will not move. A wire is broken. The street
continues buried beneath the snow, and the fate of Herculaneum and
Pompeii has its parallel in this catastrophe.

Alas! my kind and gentle audience, you know not the extent of your
misfortune. The scenes to come were far better than the past. The
street itself would have been more worthy of pictorial exhibition; the
deeds of its inhabitants not less so. And how would your interest have
deepened, as, passing out of the cold shadow of antiquity, in my long
and weary course, I should arrive within the limits of man’s memory,
and, leading you at last into the sunshine of the present, should give
a reflex of the very life that is flitting past us! Your own beauty, my
fair townswomen, would have beamed upon you, out of my scene. Not a
gentleman that walks the street but should have beheld his own face and
figure, his gait, the peculiar swing of his arm, and the coat that he
put on yesterday. Then, too,—and it is what I chiefly regret,—I had
expended a vast deal of light and brilliancy on a representation of the
street in its whole length, from Buffum’s Corner downward, on the night
of the grand illumination for General Taylor’s triumph. Lastly, I
should have given the crank one other turn, and have brought out the
future, showing you who shall walk the Main Street to-morrow, and,
perchance, whose funeral shall pass through it!

But these, like most other human purposes, lie unaccomplished; and I
have only further to say, that any lady or gentlemen who may feel
dissatisfied with the evening’s entertainment shall receive back the
admission fee at the door.

“Then give me mine,” cries the critic, stretching out his palm. “I said
that your exhibition would prove a humbug, and so it has turned out.
So, hand over my quarter!”




ETHAN BRAND:
A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE


Bartram the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, begrimed with
charcoal, sat watching his kiln at nightfall, while his little son
played at building houses with the scattered fragments of marble, when,
on the hill-side below them, they heard a roar of laughter, not
mirthful, but slow, and even solemn, like a wind shaking the boughs of
the forest.

“Father, what is that?” asked the little boy, leaving his play, and
pressing betwixt his father’s knees.

“Oh, some drunken man, I suppose,” answered the lime-burner; “some
merry fellow from the bar-room in the village, who dared not laugh loud
enough within doors lest he should blow the roof of the house off. So
here he is, shaking his jolly sides at the foot of Graylock.”

“But, father,” said the child, more sensitive than the obtuse,
middle-aged clown, “he does not laugh like a man that is glad. So the
noise frightens me!”

“Don’t be a fool, child!” cried his father, gruffly. “You will never
make a man, I do believe; there is too much of your mother in you. I
have known the rustling of a leaf startle you. Hark! Here comes the
merry fellow now. You shall see that there is no harm in him.”

Bartram and his little son, while they were talking thus, sat watching
the same lime-kiln that had been the scene of Ethan Brand’s solitary
and meditative life, before he began his search for the Unpardonable
Sin. Many years, as we have seen, had now elapsed, since that
portentous night when the IDEA was first developed. The kiln, however,
on the mountain-side, stood unimpaired, and was in nothing changed
since he had thrown his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its
furnace, and melted them, as it were, into the one thought that took
possession of his life. It was a rude, round, tower-like structure
about twenty feet high, heavily built of rough stones, and with a
hillock of earth heaped about the larger part of its circumference; so
that the blocks and fragments of marble might be drawn by cart-loads,
and thrown in at the top. There was an opening at the bottom of the
tower, like an over-mouth, but large enough to admit a man in a
stooping posture, and provided with a massive iron door. With the smoke
and jets of flame issuing from the chinks and crevices of this door,
which seemed to give admittance into the hill-side, it resembled
nothing so much as the private entrance to the infernal regions, which
the shepherds of the Delectable Mountains were accustomed to show to
pilgrims.

There are many such lime-kilns in that tract of country, for the
purpose of burning the white marble which composes a large part of the
substance of the hills. Some of them, built years ago, and long
deserted, with weeds growing in the vacant round of the interior, which
is open to the sky, and grass and wild-flowers rooting themselves into
the chinks of the stones, look already like relics of antiquity, and
may yet be overspread with the lichens of centuries to come. Others,
where the lime-burner still feeds his daily and night-long fire, afford
points of interest to the wanderer among the hills, who seats himself
on a log of wood or a fragment of marble, to hold a chat with the
solitary man. It is a lonesome, and, when the character is inclined to
thought, may be an intensely thoughtful occupation; as it proved in the
case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to such strange purpose, in days
gone by, while the fire in this very kiln was burning.

The man who now watched the fire was of a different order, and troubled
himself with no thoughts save the very few that were requisite to his
business. At frequent intervals, he flung back the clashing weight of
the iron door, and, turning his face from the insufferable glare,
thrust in huge logs of oak, or stirred the immense brands with a long
pole. Within the furnace were seen the curling and riotous flames, and
the burning marble, almost molten with the intensity of heat; while
without, the reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy of
the surrounding forest, and showed in the foreground a bright and ruddy
little picture of the hut, the spring beside its door, the athletic and
coal-begrimed figure of the lime-burner, and the half-frightened child,
shrinking into the protection of his father’s shadow. And when, again,
the iron door was closed, then reappeared the tender light of the
half-full moon, which vainly strove to trace out the indistinct shapes
of the neighboring mountains; and, in the upper sky, there was a
flitting congregation of clouds, still faintly tinged with the rosy
sunset, though thus far down into the valley the sunshine had vanished
long and long ago.

The little boy now crept still closer to his father, as footsteps were
heard ascending the hill-side, and a human form thrust aside the bushes
that clustered beneath the trees.

“Halloo! who is it?” cried the lime-burner, vexed at his son’s
timidity, yet half infected by it. “Come forward, and show yourself,
like a man, or I’ll fling this chunk of marble at your head!”

“You offer me a rough welcome,” said a gloomy voice, as the unknown man
drew nigh. “Yet I neither claim nor desire a kinder one, even at my own
fireside.”

To obtain a distincter view, Bartram threw open the iron door of the
kiln, whence immediately issued a gush of fierce light, that smote full
upon the stranger’s face and figure. To a careless eye there appeared
nothing very remarkable in his aspect, which was that of a man in a
coarse brown, country-made suit of clothes, tall and thin, with the
staff and heavy shoes of a wayfarer. As he advanced, he fixed his
eyes—which were very bright—intently upon the brightness of the
furnace, as if he beheld, or expected to behold, some object worthy of
note within it.

“Good evening, stranger,” said the lime-burner; “whence come you, so
late in the day?”

“I come from my search,” answered the wayfarer; “for, at last, it is
finished.”

“Drunk!—or crazy!” muttered Bartram to himself. “I shall have trouble
with the fellow. The sooner I drive him away, the better.”

The little boy, all in a tremble, whispered to his father, and begged
him to shut the door of the kiln, so that there might not be so much
light; for that there was something in the man’s face which he was
afraid to look at, yet could not look away from. And, indeed, even the
lime-burner’s dull and torpid sense began to be impressed by an
indescribable something in that thin, rugged, thoughtful visage, with
the grizzled hair hanging wildly about it, and those deeply sunken
eyes, which gleamed like fires within the entrance of a mysterious
cavern. But, as he closed the door, the stranger turned towards him,
and spoke in a quiet, familiar way, that made Bartram feel as if he
were a sane and sensible man, after all.

“Your task draws to an end, I see,” said he. “This marble has already
been burning three days. A few hours more will convert the stone to
lime.”

“Why, who are you?” exclaimed the lime-burner. “You seem as well
acquainted with my business as I am myself.”

“And well I may be,” said the stranger; “for I followed the same craft
many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. But you are a
newcomer in these parts. Did you never hear of Ethan Brand?”

“The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin?” asked Bartram,
with a laugh.

“The same,” answered the stranger. “He has found what he sought, and
therefore he comes back again.”

“What! then you are Ethan Brand himself?” cried the lime-burner, in
amazement. “I am a new-comer here, as you say, and they call it
eighteen years since you left the foot of Graylock. But, I can tell
you, the good folks still talk about Ethan Brand, in the village
yonder, and what a strange errand took him away from his lime-kiln.
Well, and so you have found the Unpardonable Sin?”

“Even so!” said the stranger, calmly.

“If the question is a fair one,” proceeded Bartram, “where might it
be?”

Ethan Brand laid his finger on his own heart.

“Here!” replied he.

And then, without mirth in his countenance, but as if moved by an
involuntary recognition of the infinite absurdity of seeking throughout
the world for what was the closest of all things to himself, and
looking into every heart, save his own, for what was hidden in no other
breast, he broke into a laugh of scorn. It was the same slow, heavy
laugh, that had almost appalled the lime-burner when it heralded the
wayfarer’s approach.

The solitary mountain-side was made dismal by it. Laughter, when out of
place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling,
may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The laughter of
one asleep, even if it be a little child,—the madman’s laugh,—the wild,
screaming laugh of a born idiot,—are sounds that we sometimes tremble
to hear, and would always willingly forget. Poets have imagined no
utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh.
And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange
man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled
away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.

“Joe,” said he to his little son, “scamper down to the tavern in the
village, and tell the jolly fellows there that Ethan Brand has come
back, and that he has found the Unpardonable Sin!”

The boy darted away on his errand, to which Ethan Brand made no
objection, nor seemed hardly to notice it. He sat on a log of wood,
looking steadfastly at the iron door of the kiln. When the child was
out of sight, and his swift and light footsteps ceased to be heard
treading first on the fallen leaves and then on the rocky
mountain-path, the lime-burner began to regret his departure. He felt
that the little fellow’s presence had been a barrier between his guest
and himself, and that he must now deal, heart to heart, with a man who,
on his own confession, had committed the one only crime for which
Heaven could afford no mercy. That crime, in its indistinct blackness,
seemed to overshadow him, and made his memory riotous with a throng of
evil shapes that asserted their kindred with the Master Sin, whatever
it might be, which it was within the scope of man’s corrupted nature to
conceive and cherish. They were all of one family; they went to and fro
between his breast and Ethan Brand’s, and carried dark greetings from
one to the other.

Then Bartram remembered the stories which had grown traditionary in
reference to this strange man, who had come upon him like a shadow of
the night, and was making himself at home in his old place, after so
long absence, that the dead people, dead and buried for years, would
have had more right to be at home, in any familiar spot, than he. Ethan
Brand, it was said, had conversed with Satan himself in the lurid blaze
of this very kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth heretofore, but
looked grisly now. According to this tale, before Ethan Brand departed
on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from the hot
furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in order to confer with
him about the Unpardonable Sin; the man and the fiend each laboring to
frame the image of some mode of guilt which could neither be atoned for
nor forgiven. And, with the first gleam of light upon the mountain-top,
the fiend crept in at the iron door, there to abide the intensest
element of fire until again summoned forth to share in the dreadful
task of extending man’s possible guilt beyond the scope of Heaven’s
else infinite mercy.

While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these thoughts,
Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of the kiln. The
action was in such accordance with the idea in Bartram’s mind, that he
almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot, from the
raging furnace.

“Hold! hold!” cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he was
ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. “Don’t, for
mercy’s sake, bring out your Devil now!”

“Man!” sternly replied Ethan Brand, “what need have I of the Devil? I
have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners
as you that he busies himself. Fear not, because I open the door. I do
but act by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like a
lime-burner, as I was once.”

He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to
gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce
glow that reddened upon his face. The lime-burner sat watching him, and
half suspected this strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a
fiend, at least to plunge into the flames, and thus vanish from the
sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the
door of the kiln.

“I have looked,” said he, “into many a human heart that was seven times
hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire. But I
found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!”

“What is the Unpardonable Sin?” asked the lime-burner; and then he
shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should
be answered.

“It is a sin that grew within my own breast,” replied Ethan Brand,
standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his
stamp. “A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that
triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God,
and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims! The only sin that
deserves a recompense of immortal agony! Freely, were it to do again,
would I incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution!”

“The man’s head is turned,” muttered the lime-burner to himself. “He
may be a sinner like the rest of us,—nothing more likely,—but, I’ll be
sworn, he is a madman too.”

Nevertheless, he felt uncomfortable at his situation, alone with Ethan
Brand on the wild mountain-side, and was right glad to hear the rough
murmur of tongues, and the footsteps of what seemed a pretty numerous
party, stumbling over the stones and rustling through the underbrush.
Soon appeared the whole lazy regiment that was wont to infest the
village tavern, comprehending three or four individuals who had drunk
flip beside the bar-room fire through all the winters, and smoked their
pipes beneath the stoop through all the summers, since Ethan Brand’s
departure. Laughing boisterously, and mingling all their voices
together in unceremonious talk, they now burst into the moonshine and
narrow streaks of firelight that illuminated the open space before the
lime-kiln. Bartram set the door ajar again, flooding the spot with
light, that the whole company might get a fair view of Ethan Brand, and
he of them.

There, among other old acquaintances, was a once ubiquitous man, now
almost extinct, but whom we were formerly sure to encounter at the
hotel of every thriving village throughout the country. It was the
stage-agent. The present specimen of the genus was a wilted and
smoke-dried man, wrinkled and red-nosed, in a smartly cut, brown,
bobtailed coat, with brass buttons, who, for a length of time unknown,
had kept his desk and corner in the bar-room, and was still puffing
what seemed to be the same cigar that he had lighted twenty years
before. He had great fame as a dry joker, though, perhaps, less on
account of any intrinsic humor than from a certain flavor of
brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke, which impregnated all his ideas and
expressions, as well as his person. Another well-remembered, though
strangely altered, face was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still
called him in courtesy; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled
shirtsleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an
attorney, in what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and
in great vogue among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and
toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night,
had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and degrees
of bodily labor, till at last, to adopt his own phrase, he slid into a
soap-vat. In other words, Giles was now a soap-boiler, in a small way.
He had come to be but the fragment of a human being, a part of one foot
having been chopped off by an axe, and an entire hand torn away by the
devilish grip of a steam-engine. Yet, though the corporeal hand was
gone, a spiritual member remained; for, stretching forth the stump,
Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers
with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated. A
maimed and miserable wretch he was; but one, nevertheless, whom the
world could not trample on, and had no right to scorn, either in this
or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since he had still kept up
the courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in charity, and with his
one hand—and that the left one—fought a stern battle against want and
hostile circumstances.

Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with certain points
of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of difference. It was the
village doctor; a man of some fifty years, whom, at an earlier period
of his life, we introduced as paying a professional visit to Ethan
Brand during the latter’s supposed insanity. He was now a
purple-visaged, rude, and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure, with
something wild, ruined, and desperate in his talk, and in all the
details of his gesture and manners. Brandy possessed this man like an
evil spirit, and made him as surly and savage as a wild beast, and as
miserable as a lost soul; but there was supposed to be in him such
wonderful skill, such native gifts of healing, beyond any which medical
science could impart, that society caught hold of him, and would not
let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro upon his horse,
and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited all the
sick-chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, and sometimes
raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or quite as often, no
doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug many a year too soon.
The doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and, as somebody said,
in allusion to his habit of swearing, it was always alight with
hell-fire.

These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand each
after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the
contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he would
find something far better worth seeking than the Unpardonable Sin. No
mind, which has wrought itself by intense and solitary meditation into
a high state of enthusiasm, can endure the kind of contact with low and
vulgar modes of thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now
subjected. It made him doubt—and, strange to say, it was a painful
doubt—whether he had indeed found the Unpardonable Sin, and found it
within himself. The whole question on which he had exhausted life, and
more than life, looked like a delusion.

“Leave me,” he said bitterly, “ye brute beasts, that have made
yourselves so, shrivelling up your souls with fiery liquors! I have
done with you. Years and years ago, I groped into your hearts and found
nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gone!”

“Why, you uncivil scoundrel,” cried the fierce doctor, “is that the way
you respond to the kindness of your best friends? Then let me tell you
the truth. You have no more found the Unpardonable Sin than yonder boy
Joe has. You are but a crazy fellow,—I told you so twenty years
ago,—neither better nor worse than a crazy fellow, and the fit
companion of old Humphrey, here!”

He pointed to an old man, shabbily dressed, with long white hair, thin
visage, and unsteady eyes. For some years past this aged person had
been wandering about among the hills, inquiring of all travellers whom
he met for his daughter. The girl, it seemed, had gone off with a
company of circus-performers, and occasionally tidings of her came to
the village, and fine stories were told of her glittering appearance as
she rode on horseback in the ring, or performed marvellous feats on the
tight-rope.

The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed
unsteadily into his face.

“They tell me you have been all over the earth,” said he, wringing his
hands with earnestness. “You must have seen my daughter, for she makes
a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she
send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?”

Ethan Brand’s eye quailed beneath the old man’s. That daughter, from
whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our
tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan
Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted,
absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.

“Yes,” he murmured, turning away from the hoary wanderer, “it is no
delusion. There is an Unpardonable Sin!”

While these things were passing, a merry scene was going forward in the
area of cheerful light, beside the spring and before the door of the
hut. A number of the youth of the village, young men and girls, had
hurried up the hill-side, impelled by curiosity to see Ethan Brand, the
hero of so many a legend familiar to their childhood. Finding nothing,
however, very remarkable in his aspect,—nothing but a sunburnt
wayfarer, in plain garb and dusty shoes, who sat looking into the fire
as if he fancied pictures among the coals,—these young people speedily
grew tired of observing him. As it happened, there was other amusement
at hand. An old German Jew travelling with a diorama on his back, was
passing down the mountain-road towards the village just as the party
turned aside from it, and, in hopes of eking out the profits of the
day, the showman had kept them company to the lime-kiln.

“Come, old Dutchman,” cried one of the young men, “let us see your
pictures, if you can swear they are worth looking at!”

“Oh yes, Captain,” answered the Jew,—whether as a matter of courtesy or
craft, he styled everybody Captain,—“I shall show you, indeed, some
very superb pictures!”

So, placing his box in a proper position, he invited the young men and
girls to look through the glass orifices of the machine, and proceeded
to exhibit a series of the most outrageous scratchings and daubings, as
specimens of the fine arts, that ever an itinerant showman had the face
to impose upon his circle of spectators. The pictures were worn out,
moreover, tattered, full of cracks and wrinkles, dingy with
tobacco-smoke, and otherwise in a most pitiable condition. Some
purported to be cities, public edifices, and ruined castles in Europe;
others represented Napoleon’s battles and Nelson’s sea-fights; and in
the midst of these would be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand,—which
might have been mistaken for the Hand of Destiny, though, in truth, it
was only the showman’s,—pointing its forefinger to various scenes of
the conflict, while its owner gave historical illustrations. When, with
much merriment at its abominable deficiency of merit, the exhibition
was concluded, the German bade little Joe put his head into the box.
Viewed through the magnifying-glasses, the boy’s round, rosy visage
assumed the strangest imaginable aspect of an immense Titanic child,
the mouth grinning broadly, and the eyes and every other feature
overflowing with fun at the joke. Suddenly, however, that merry face
turned pale, and its expression changed to horror, for this easily
impressed and excitable child had become sensible that the eye of Ethan
Brand was fixed upon him through the glass.

“You make the little man to be afraid, Captain,” said the German Jew,
turning up the dark and strong outline of his visage from his stooping
posture. “But look again, and, by chance, I shall cause you to see
somewhat that is very fine, upon my word!”

Ethan Brand gazed into the box for an instant, and then starting back,
looked fixedly at the German. What had he seen? Nothing, apparently;
for a curious youth, who had peeped in almost at the same moment,
beheld only a vacant space of canvas.

“I remember you now,” muttered Ethan Brand to the showman.

“Ah, Captain,” whispered the Jew of Nuremberg, with a dark smile, “I
find it to be a heavy matter in my show-box,—this Unpardonable Sin! By
my faith, Captain, it has wearied my shoulders, this long day, to carry
it over the mountain.”

“Peace,” answered Ethan Brand, sternly, “or get thee into the furnace
yonder!”

The Jew’s exhibition had scarcely concluded, when a great, elderly
dog—who seemed to be his own master, as no person in the company laid
claim to him—saw fit to render himself the object of public notice.
Hitherto, he had shown himself a very quiet, well-disposed old dog,
going round from one to another, and, by way of being sociable,
offering his rough head to be patted by any kindly hand that would take
so much trouble. But now, all of a sudden, this grave and venerable
quadruped, of his own mere motion, and without the slightest suggestion
from anybody else, began to run round after his tail, which, to
heighten the absurdity of the proceeding, was a great deal shorter than
it should have been. Never was seen such headlong eagerness in pursuit
of an object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such
a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,—as
if one end of the ridiculous brute’s body were at deadly and most
unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went
the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of
his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity;
until, utterly exhausted, and as far from the goal as ever, the foolish
old dog ceased his performance as suddenly as he had begun it. The next
moment he was as mild, quiet, sensible, and respectable in his
deportment, as when he first scraped acquaintance with the company.

As may be supposed, the exhibition was greeted with universal laughter,
clapping of hands, and shouts of encore, to which the canine performer
responded by wagging all that there was to wag of his tail, but
appeared totally unable to repeat his very successful effort to amuse
the spectators.

Meanwhile, Ethan Brand had resumed his seat upon the log, and moved, as
it might be, by a perception of some remote analogy between his own
case and that of this self-pursuing cur, he broke into the awful laugh,
which, more than any other token, expressed the condition of his inward
being. From that moment, the merriment of the party was at an end; they
stood aghast, dreading lest the inauspicious sound should be
reverberated around the horizon, and that mountain would thunder it to
mountain, and so the horror be prolonged upon their ears. Then,
whispering one to another that it was late,—that the moon was almost
down,-that the August night was growing chill,—they hurried homewards,
leaving the lime-burner and little Joe to deal as they might with their
unwelcome guest. Save for these three human beings, the open space on
the hill-side was a solitude, set in a vast gloom of forest. Beyond
that darksome verge, the firelight glimmered on the stately trunks and
almost black foliage of pines, intermixed with the lighter verdure of
sapling oaks, maples, and poplars, while here and there lay the
gigantic corpses of dead trees, decaying on the leaf-strewn soil. And
it seemed to little Joe—a timorous and imaginative child—that the
silent forest was holding its breath until some fearful thing should
happen.

Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door of the
kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner and his son, he
bade, rather than advised, them to retire to rest.

“For myself, I cannot sleep,” said he. “I have matters that it concerns
me to meditate upon. I will watch the fire, as I used to do in the old
time.”

“And call the Devil out of the furnace to keep you company, I suppose,”
muttered Bartram, who had been making intimate acquaintance with the
black bottle above mentioned. “But watch, if you like, and call as many
devils as you like! For my part, I shall be all the better for a
snooze. Come, Joe!”

As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back at the
wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender spirit had
an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in which this man had
enveloped himself.

When they had gone, Ethan Brand sat listening to the crackling of the
kindled wood, and looking at the little spirts of fire that issued
through the chinks of the door. These trifles, however, once so
familiar, had but the slightest hold of his attention, while deep
within his mind he was reviewing the gradual but marvellous change that
had been wrought upon him by the search to which he had devoted
himself. He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,—how the
dark forest had whispered to him,—how the stars had gleamed upon him,—a
simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by, and ever
musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love
and sympathy for mankind and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had
first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the
inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into
the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and,
however desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother; with what
awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed
that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued
that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress, disturbed
the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed
his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on
cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were
susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer
to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth,
laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber
after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,
indeed, had withered,—had contracted,—had hardened,—had perished! It
had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of
the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening
the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy
sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was
now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets,
and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were
demanded for his study.

Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that
his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his
intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable
development,—as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious
fruit of his life’s labor,—he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!

“What more have I to seek? what more to achieve?” said Ethan Brand to
himself. “My task is done, and well done!”

Starting from the log with a certain alacrity in his gait and ascending
the hillock of earth that was raised against the stone circumference of
the lime-kiln, he thus reached the top of the structure. It was a space
of perhaps ten feet across, from edge to edge, presenting a view of the
upper surface of the immense mass of broken marble with which the kiln
was heaped. All these innumerable blocks and fragments of marble were
redhot and vividly on fire, sending up great spouts of blue flame,
which quivered aloft and danced madly, as within a magic circle, and
sank and rose again, with continual and multitudinous activity. As the
lonely man bent forward over this terrible body of fire, the blasting
heat smote up against his person with a breath that, it might be
supposed, would have scorched and shrivelled him up in a moment.

Ethan Brand stood erect, and raised his arms on high. The blue flames
played upon his face, and imparted the wild and ghastly light which
alone could have suited its expression; it was that of a fiend on the
verge of plunging into his gulf of intensest torment.

“O Mother Earth,” cried he, “who art no more my Mother, and into whose
bosom this frame shall never be resolved! O mankind, whose brotherhood
I have cast off, and trampled thy great heart beneath my feet! O stars
of heaven, that shone on me of old, as if to light me onward and
upward!—farewell all, and forever. Come, deadly element of
Fire,-henceforth my familiar friend! Embrace me, as I do thee!”

That night the sound of a fearful peal of laughter rolled heavily
through the sleep of the lime-burner and his little son; dim shapes of
horror and anguish haunted their dreams, and seemed still present in
the rude hovel, when they opened their eyes to the daylight.

“Up, boy, up!” cried the lime-burner, staring about him. “Thank Heaven,
the night is gone, at last; and rather than pass such another, I would
watch my lime-kiln, wide awake, for a twelvemonth. This Ethan Brand,
with his humbug of an Unpardonable Sin, has done me no such mighty
favor, in taking my place!”

He issued from the hut, followed by little Joe, who kept fast hold of
his father’s hand. The early sunshine was already pouring its gold upon
the mountain-tops, and though the valleys were still in shadow, they
smiled cheerfully in the promise of the bright day that was hastening
onward. The village, completely shut in by hills, which swelled away
gently about it, looked as if it had rested peacefully in the hollow of
the great hand of Providence. Every dwelling was distinctly visible;
the little spires of the two churches pointed upwards, and caught a
fore-glimmering of brightness from the sun-gilt skies upon their gilded
weather-cocks. The tavern was astir, and the figure of the old,
smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen beneath the stoop.
Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered
likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were
heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into
the valley, others high up towards the summits, and still others, of
the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the
upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that
rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed
in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the
heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream
to look at it.

To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so
readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling
down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while Echo
caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and
elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to
little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each
contributing a strain of airy sweetness.

Little Joe’s face brightened at once.

“Dear father,” cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, “that strange
man is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem glad of it!”

“Yes,” growled the lime-burner, with an oath, “but he has let the fire
go down, and no thanks to him if five hundred bushels of lime are not
spoiled. If I catch the fellow hereabouts again, I shall feel like
tossing him into the furnace!”

With his long pole in his hand, he ascended to the top of the kiln.
After a moment’s pause, he called to his son.

“Come up here, Joe!” said he.

So little Joe ran up the hillock, and stood by his father’s side. The
marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface,
in the midst of the circle,—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted
into lime,—lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after
long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was
the shape of a human heart.

“Was the fellow’s heart made of marble?” cried Bartram, in some
perplexity at this phenomenon. “At any rate, it is burnt into what
looks like special good lime; and, taking all the bones together, my
kiln is half a bushel the richer for him.”

So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it fall
upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled into
fragments.




A BELL’S BIOGRAPHY


Hearken to our neighbor with the iron tongue. While I sit musing over
my sheet of foolscap, he emphatically tells the hour, in tones loud
enough for all the town to hear, though doubtless intended only as a
gentle hint to myself, that I may begin his biography before the
evening shall be further wasted. Unquestionably, a personage in such an
elevated position, and making so great a noise in the world, has a fair
claim to the services of a biographer. He is the representative and
most illustrious member of that innumerable class, whose characteristic
feature is the tongue, and whose sole business, to clamor for the
public good. If any of his noisy brethren, in our tongue-governed
democracy, be envious of the superiority which I have assigned him,
they have my free consent to hang themselves as high as he. And, for
his history, let not the reader apprehend an empty repetition of
ding-dong-bell. He has been the passive hero of wonderful vicissitudes,
with which I have chanced to become acquainted, possibly from his own
mouth; while the careless multitude supposed him to be talking merely
of the time of day, or calling them to dinner or to church, or bidding
drowsy people go bedward, or the dead to their graves. Many a
revolution has it been his fate to go through, and invariably with a
prodigious uproar. And whether or no he have told me his reminiscences,
this at least is true, that the more I study his deep-toned language,
the more sense, and sentiment, and soul, do I discover in it.

This bell—for we may as well drop our quaint personification—is of
antique French manufacture, and the symbol of the cross betokens that
it was meant to be suspended in the belfry of a Romish place of
worship. The old people hereabout have a tradition, that a considerable
part of the metal was supplied by a brass cannon, captured in one of
the victories of Louis the Fourteenth over the Spaniards, and that a
Bourbon princess threw her golden crucifix into the molten mass. It is
said, likewise, that a bishop baptized and blessed the bell, and prayed
that a heavenly influence might mingle with its tones. When all due
ceremonies had been performed, the Grand Monarque bestowed the
gift—than which none could resound his beneficence more loudly—on the
Jesuits, who were then converting the American Indians to the spiritual
dominion of the Pope. So the bell,—our self-same bell, whose familiar
voice we may hear at all hours, in the streets,—this very bell sent
forth its first-born accents from the tower of a log-built chapel,
westward of Lake Champlain, and near the mighty stream of the St.
Lawrence. It was called Our Lady’s Chapel of the Forest. The peal went
forth as if to redeem and consecrate the heathen wilderness. The wolf
growled at the sound, as he prowled stealthily through the underbrush;
the grim bear turned his back, and stalked sullenly away; the startled
doe leaped up, and led her fawn into a deeper solitude. The red men
wondered what awful voice was speaking amid the wind that roared
through the tree-tops; and, following reverentially its summons, the
dark-robed fathers blessed them, as they drew near the cross-crowned
chapel. In a little time, there was a crucifix on every dusky bosom.
The Indians knelt beneath the lowly roof, worshipping in the same forms
that were observed under the vast dome of St. Peter’s, when the Pope
performed high mass in the presence of kneeling princes. All the
religious festivals, that awoke the chiming bells of lofty cathedrals,
called forth a peal from Our Lady’s Chapel of the Forest. Loudly rang
the bell of the wilderness while the streets of Paris echoed with
rejoicings for the birthday of the Bourbon, or whenever France had
triumphed on some European battle-field. And the solemn woods were
saddened with a melancholy knell, as often as the thick-strewn leaves
were swept away from the virgin soil, for the burial of an Indian
chief.

Meantime, the bells of a hostile people and a hostile faith were
ringing on Sabbaths and lecture-days, at Boston and other Puritan
towns. Their echoes died away hundreds of miles southeastward of Our
Lady’s Chapel. But scouts had threaded the pathless desert that lay
between, and, from behind the huge tree-trunks, perceived the Indians
assembling at the summons of the bell. Some bore flaxen-haired scalps
at their girdles, as if to lay those bloody trophies on Our Lady’s
altar. It was reported, and believed, all through New England, that the
Pope of Rome, and the King of France, had established this little
chapel in the forest, for the purpose of stirring up the red men to a
crusade against the English settlers. The latter took energetic
measures to secure their religion and their lives. On the eve of an
especial fast of the Romish Church, while the bell tolled dismally, and
the priests were chanting a doleful stave, a band of New England
rangers rushed from the surrounding woods. Fierce shouts, and the
report of musketry, pealed suddenly within the chapel. The ministering
priests threw themselves before the altar, and were slain even on its
steps. If, as antique traditions tell us, no grass will grow where the
blood of martyrs has been shed, there should be a barren spot, to this
very day, on the site of that desecrated altar.

While the blood was still plashing from step to step, the leader of the
rangers seized a torch, and applied it to the drapery of the shrine.
The flame and smoke arose, as from a burnt-sacrifice, at once
illuminating and obscuring the whole interior of the chapel,—now hiding
the dead priests in a sable shroud, now revealing them and their
slayers in one terrific glare. Some already wished that the altar-smoke
could cover the deed from the sight of Heaven. But one of the rangers—a
man of sanctified aspect, though his hands were bloody—approached the
captain.

“Sir,” said he, “our village meeting-house lacks a bell, and hitherto
we have been fain to summon the good people to worship by beat of drum.
Give me, I pray you, the bell of this popish chapel, for the sake of
the godly Mr. Rogers, who doubtless hath remembered us in the prayers
of the congregation, ever since we began our march. Who can tell what
share of this night’s good success we owe to that holy man’s wrestling
with the Lord?”

“Nay, then,” answered the captain, “if good Mr. Rogers hath holpen our
enterprise, it is right that he should share the spoil. Take the bell
and welcome, Deacon Lawson, if you will be at the trouble of carrying
it home. Hitherto it hath spoken nothing but papistry, and that too in
the French or Indian gibberish; but I warrant me, if Mr. Rogers
consecrate it anew, it will talk like a good English and Protestant
bell.”

So Deacon Lawson and half a score of his townsmen took down the bell,
suspended it on a pole, and bore it away on their sturdy shoulders,
meaning to carry it to the shore of Lake Champlain, and thence homeward
by water. Far through the woods gleamed the flames of Our Lady’s
Chapel, flinging fantastic shadows from the clustered foliage, and
glancing on brooks that had never caught the sunlight. As the rangers
traversed the midnight forest, staggering under their heavy burden, the
tongue of the bell gave many a tremendous stroke,—clang, clang,
clang!—a most doleful sound, as if it were tolling for the slaughter of
the priests and the ruin of the chapel. Little dreamed Deacon Lawson
and his townsmen that it was their own funeral knell. A war-party of
Indians had heard the report, of musketry, and seen the blaze of the
chapel, and now were on the track of the rangers, summoned to vengeance
by the bell’s dismal murmurs. In the midst of a deep swamp, they made a
sudden onset on the retreating foe. Good Deacon Lawson battled stoutly,
but had his skull cloven by a tomahawk, and sank into the depths of the
morass, with the ponderous bell above him. And, for many a year
thereafter, our hero’s voice was heard no more on earth, neither at the
hour of worship, nor at festivals nor funerals.

And is he still buried in that unknown grave? Scarcely so, dear reader.
Hark! How plainly we hear him at this moment, the spokesman of Time,
proclaiming that it is nine o’clock at night! We may therefore safely
conclude that some happy chance has restored him to upper air.

But there lay the bell, for many silent years; and the wonder is, that
he did not lie silent there a century, or perhaps a dozen centuries,
till the world should have forgotten not only his voice, but the voices
of the whole brotherhood of bells. How would the first accent of his
iron tongue have startled his resurrectionists! But he was not fated to
be a subject of discussion among the antiquaries of far posterity. Near
the close of the Old French War, a party of New England axe-men, who
preceded the march of Colonel Bradstreet toward Lake Ontario, were
building a bridge of logs through a swamp. Plunging down a stake, one
of these pioneers felt it graze against some hard, smooth substance. He
called his comrades, and, by their united efforts, the top of the bell
was raised to the surface, a rope made fast to it, and thence passed
over the horizontal limb of a tree. Heave ho! up they hoisted their
prize, dripping with moisture, and festooned with verdant water-moss.
As the base of the bell emerged from the swamp, the pioneers perceived
that a skeleton was clinging with its bony fingers to the clapper, but
immediately relaxing its nerveless grasp, sank back into the stagnant
water. The bell then gave forth a sullen clang. No wonder that he was
in haste to speak, after holding his tongue for such a length of time!
The pioneers shoved the bell to and fro, thus ringing a loud and heavy
peal, which echoed widely through the forest, and reached the ears of
Colonel Bradstreet, and his three thousand men. The soldiers paused on
their march; a feeling of religion, mingled with borne-tenderness,
overpowered their rude hearts; each seemed to hear the clangor of the
old church-bell, which had been familiar to hint from infancy, and had
tolled at the funerals of all his forefathers. By what magic had that
holy sound strayed over the wide-murmuring ocean, and become audible
amid the clash of arms, the loud crashing of the artillery over the
rough wilderness-path, and the melancholy roar of the wind among the
boughs?

The New-Englanders hid their prize in a shadowy nook, betwixt a large
gray stone and the earthy roots of an overthrown tree; and when the
campaign was ended, they conveyed our friend to Boston, and put him up
at auction on the sidewalk of King Street. He was suspended, for the
nonce, by a block and tackle, and being swung backward and forward,
gave such loud and clear testimony to his own merits, that the
auctioneer had no need to say a word. The highest bidder was a rich old
representative from our town, who piously bestowed the bell on the
meeting-house where he had been a worshipper for half a century. The
good man had his reward. By a strange coincidence, the very first duty
of the sexton, after the bell had been hoisted into the belfry, was to
toll the funeral knell of the donor. Soon, however, those doleful
echoes were drowned by a triumphant peal for the surrender of Quebec.

Ever since that period, our hero has occupied the same elevated
station, and has put in his word on all matters of public importance,
civil, military, or religious. On the day when Independence was first
proclaimed in the street beneath, he uttered a peal which many deemed
ominous and fearful, rather than triumphant. But he has told the same
story these sixty years, and none mistake his meaning now. When
Washington, in the fulness of his glory, rode through our flower-strewn
streets, this was the tongue that bade the Father of his Country
welcome! Again the same voice was heard, when La Fayette came to gather
in his half-century’s harvest of gratitude. Meantime, vast changes have
been going on below. His voice, which once floated over a little
provincial seaport, is now reverberated between brick edifices, and
strikes the ear amid the buzz and tumult of a city. On the Sabbaths of
olden time, the summons of the bell was obeyed by a picturesque and
varied throng; stately gentlemen in purple velvet coats, embroidered
waistcoats, white wigs, and gold-laced hats, stepping with grave
courtesy beside ladies in flowered satin gowns, and hoop-petticoats of
majestic circumference; while 

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