Twice-told tales
youth came up at nightfall from the valley of the Saco, and opened his
heart to you in the evening, and passed through the Notch by sunrise,
and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, ‘Who was he? Whither did
the wanderer go?’ But I cannot die till I have achieved my destiny.
Then let Death come: I shall have built my monument.”
There was a continual flow of natural emotion gushing forth amid
abstracted reverie which enabled the family to understand this young
man’s sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quick
sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which he had
been betrayed.
“You laugh at me,” said he, taking the eldest daughter’s hand and
laughing himself. “You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were to
freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington only that people
might spy at me from the country roundabout. And truly that would be a
noble pedestal for a man’s statue.”
“It is better to sit here by this fire,” answered the girl, blushing,
“and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us.”
“I suppose,” said her father, after a fit of musing, “there is
something natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had been
turned that way, I might have felt just the same.—It is strange, wife,
how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty certain
never to come to pass.”
“Perhaps they may,” observed the wife. “Is the man thinking what he
will do when he is a widower?”
“No, no!” cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. “When
I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine too. But I was wishing
we had a good farm in Bartlett or Bethlehem or Littleton, or some other
township round the White Mountains, but not where they could tumble on
our heads. I should want to stand well with my neighbors and be called
squire and sent to General Court for a term or two; for a plain, honest
man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I should be grown
quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be long apart, I
might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all crying around me. A
slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble one, with just my
name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know
that I lived an honest man and died a Christian.”
“There, now!” exclaimed the stranger; “it is our nature to desire a
monument, be it slate or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious
memory in the universal heart of man.”
“We’re in a strange way to-night,” said the wife, with tears in her
eyes. “They say it’s a sign of something when folks’ minds go
a-wandering so. Hark to the children!”
They listened accordingly. The younger children had been put to bed in
another room, but with an open door between; so that they could be
heard talking busily among themselves. One and all seemed to have
caught the infection from the fireside circle, and were outvying each
other in wild wishes and childish projects of what they would do when
they came to be men and women. At length a little boy, instead of
addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.
“I’ll tell you what I wish, mother,” cried he: “I want you and father
and grandma’m, and all of us, and the stranger too, to start right away
and go and take a drink out of the basin of the Flume.”
Nobody could help laughing at the child’s notion of leaving a warm bed
and dragging them from a cheerful fire to visit the basin of the
Flume—a brook which tumbles over the precipice deep within the Notch.
The boy had hardly spoken, when a wagon rattled along the road and
stopped a moment before the door. It appeared to contain two or three
men who were cheering their hearts with the rough chorus of a song
which resounded in broken notes between the cliffs, while the singers
hesitated whether to continue their journey or put up here for the
night.
“Father,” said the girl, “they are calling you by name.”
But the good man doubted whether they had really called him, and was
unwilling to show himself too solicitous of gain by inviting people to
patronize his house. He therefore did not hurry to the door, and, the
lash being soon applied, the travellers plunged into the Notch, still
singing and laughing, though their music and mirth came back drearily
from the heart of the mountain.
“There, mother!” cried the boy, again; “they’d have given us a ride to
the Flume.”
Again they laughed at the child’s pertinacious fancy for a
night-ramble. But it happened that a light cloud passed over the
daughter’s spirit; she looked gravely into the fire and drew a breath
that was almost a sigh. It forced its way, in spite of a little
struggle to repress it. Then, starting and blushing, she looked quickly
around the circle, as if they had caught a glimpse into her bosom. The
stranger asked what she had been thinking of.
“Nothing,” answered she, with a downcast smile; “only I felt lonesome
just then.”
“Oh, I have always had a gift of feeling what is in other people’s
hearts,” said he, half seriously. “Shall I tell the secrets of yours?
For I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and
complains of lonesomeness at her mother’s side. Shall I put these
feelings into words?”
“They would not be a girl’s feelings any longer if they could be put
into words,” replied the mountain-nymph, laughing, but avoiding his
eye.
All this was said apart. Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their
hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be
matured on earth; for women worship such gentle dignity as his, and the
proud, contemplative, yet kindly, soul is oftenest captivated by
simplicity like hers. But while they spoke softly, and he was watching
the happy sadness, the lightsome shadows, the shy yearnings, of a
maiden’s nature, the wind through the Notch took a deeper and drearier
sound. It seemed, as the fanciful stranger said, like the choral strain
of the spirits of the blast who in old Indian times had their dwelling
among these mountains and made their heights and recesses a sacred
region. There was a wail along the road as if a funeral were passing.
To chase away the gloom, the family threw pine-branches on their fire
till the dry leaves crackled and the flame arose, discovering once
again a scene of peace and humble happiness. The light hovered about
them fondly and caressed them all. There were the little faces of the
children peeping from their bed apart, and here the father’s frame of
strength, the mother’s subdued and careful mien, the high-browed youth,
the budding girl and the good old grandam, still knitting in the
warmest place.
The aged woman looked up from her task, and with fingers ever busy was
the next to speak.
“Old folks have their notions,” said she, “as well as young ones.
You’ve been wishing and planning and letting your heads run on one
thing and another till you’ve set my mind a-wandering too. Now, what
should an old woman wish for, when she can go but a step or two before
she comes to her grave? Children, it will haunt me night and day till I
tell you.”
“What is it, mother?” cried the husband and wife at once.
Then the old woman, with an air of mystery which drew the circle closer
round the fire, informed them that she had provided her grave-clothes
some years before—a nice linen shroud, a cap with a muslin ruff, and
everything of a finer sort than she had worn since her wedding-day. But
this evening an old superstition had strangely recurred to her. It used
to be said in her younger days that if anything were amiss with a
corpse—if only the ruff were not smooth or the cap did not set
right—the corpse, in the coffin and beneath the clods, would strive to
put up its cold hands and arrange it. The bare thought made her
nervous.
“Don’t talk so, grandmother,” said the girl, shuddering.
“Now,” continued the old woman, with singular earnestness, yet smiling
strangely at her own folly, “I want one of you, my children, when your
mother is dressed and in the coffin,—I want one of you to hold a
looking-glass over my face. Who knows but I may take a glimpse at
myself and see whether all’s right?”
“Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments,” murmured the
stranger-youth. “I wonder how mariners feel when the ship is sinking
and they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in the
ocean, that wide and nameless sepulchre?”
For a moment the old woman’s ghastly conception so engrossed the minds
of her hearers that a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar
of a blast, had grown broad, deep and terrible before the fated group
were conscious of it. The house and all within it trembled; the
foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound
were the peal of the last trump. Young and old exchanged one wild
glance and remained an instant pale, affrighted, without utterance or
power to move. Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all their
lips:
“The slide! The slide!”
The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable
horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage and
sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot, where, in contemplation
of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! they had
quitted their security and fled right into the pathway of destruction.
Down came the whole side of the mountain in a cataract of ruin. Just
before it reached the house the stream broke into two branches,
shivered not a window there, but overwhelmed the whole vicinity,
blocked up the road and annihilated everything in its dreadful course.
Long ere the thunder of that great slide had ceased to roar among the
mountains the mortal agony had been endured and the victims were at
peace. Their bodies were never found.
The next morning the light smoke was seen stealing from the cottage
chimney up the mountain-side. Within, the fire was yet smouldering on
the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants
had but gone forth to view the devastation of the slide and would
shortly return to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape. All had
left separate tokens by which those who had known the family were made
to shed a tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has
been told far and wide, and will for ever be a legend of these
mountains. Poets have sung their fate.
There were circumstances which led some to suppose that a stranger had
been received into the cottage on this awful night, and had shared the
catastrophe of all its inmates; others denied that there were
sufficient grounds for such a conjecture. Woe for the high-souled youth
with his dream of earthly immortality! His name and person utterly
unknown, his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never to be
solved, his death and his existence equally a doubt,—whose was the
agony of that death-moment?
THE SISTER-YEARS
Last night, between eleven and twelve o’clock, when the Old Year was
leaving her final footprints on the borders of Time’s empire, she found
herself in possession of a few spare moments, and sat down—of all
places in the world—on the steps of our new city-hall. The wintry
moonlight showed that she looked weary of body and sad of heart, like
many another wayfarer of earth. Her garments, having been exposed to
much foul weather and rough usage, were in very ill condition, and, as
the hurry of her journey had never before allowed her to take an
instant’s rest, her shoes were so worn as to be scarcely worth the
mending. But after trudging only a little distance farther this poor
Old Year was destined to enjoy a long, long sleep. I forgot to mention
that when she seated herself on the steps she deposited by her side a