By
Nathaniel Hawthorne
ONE SEPTEMBER NIGHT a family had
gathered round their hearth, and piled it high with the driftwood of mountain
streams, the dry cones of the pine, and the splintered ruins of great trees
that had come crashing down the precipice. Up the chimney roared the fire, and
brightened the room with its broad blaze. The faces of the father and mother
had a sober gladness; the children laughed; the eldest daughter was the image of
Happiness at seventeen; and the aged grandmother, who sat knitting in the
warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old. They had found the
"herb, heart's-ease," in the bleakest spot of all New England. This
family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the wind was sharp
throughout the year, and pitilessly cold in the winter--giving their cottage
all its fresh inclemency before it descended on the valley of the Saco. They
dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one; for a mountain towered above their
heads, so steep, that the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle
them at midnight.
The daughter had just uttered some
simple jest that filled them all with mirth, when the wind came through the
Notch and seemed to pause before their cottage--rattling the door, with a sound
of wailing and lamentation, before it passed into the valley. For a moment it
saddened them, though there was nothing unusual in the tones. But the family
were glad again when they perceived that the latch was lifted by some
traveller, whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast which
heralded his approach, and wailed as he was entering, and went moaning away
from the door.
Though they dwelt in such a
solitude, these people held daily converse with the world. The romantic pass of
the Notch is a great artery, through which the life-blood of internal commerce
is continually throbbing between Maine, on one side, and the Green Mountains
and the shores of the St. Lawrence, on the other. The stage-coach always drew
up before the door of the cottage. The way-farer, with no companion but his
staff, paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness might not
utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of the mountain, or
reach the first house in the valley. And here the teamster, on his way to
Portland market, would put up for the night; and, if a bachelor, might sit an
hour beyond the usual bedtime, and steal a kiss from the mountain maid at
parting. It was one of those primitive taverns where the traveller pays only
for food and lodging, but meets with a homely kindness beyond all price. When
the footsteps were heard, therefore, between the outer door and the inner one,
the whole family rose up, grandmother, children, and all, as if about to
welcome someone who belonged to them, and whose fate was linked with theirs.
The door was opened by a young man.
His face at first wore the melancholy expression, almost despondency, of one
who travels a wild and bleak road, at nightfall and alone, but soon brightened
up when he saw the kindly warmth of his reception. He felt his heart spring
forward to meet them all, from the old woman, who wiped a chair with her apron,
to the little child that held out its arms to him. One glance and smile placed the
stranger on a footing of innocent familiarity with the eldest daughter.
"Ah, this fire is the right
thing!" cried he; "especially when there is such a pleasant circle
round it. I am quite benumbed; for the Notch is just like the pipe of a great
pair of bellows; it has blown a terrible blast in my face all the way from
Bartlett."
"Then you are going towards
Vermont?" said the master of the house, as he helped to take a light
knapsack off the young man's shoulders.
"Yes; to Burlington, and far
enough beyond," replied he. "I meant to have been at Ethan Crawford's
tonight; but a pedestrian lingers along such a road as this. It is no matter;
for, when I saw this good fire, and all your cheerful faces, I felt as if you
had kindled it on purpose for me, and were waiting my arrival. So I shall sit
down among you, and make myself at home."
The frank-hearted stranger had just
drawn his chair to the fire when something like a heavy footstep was heard
without, rushing down the steep side of the mountain, as with long and rapid
strides, and taking such a leap in passing the cottage as to strike the
opposite precipice. The family held their breath, because they knew the sound,
and their guest held his by instinct.
"The old mountain has thrown a
stone at us, for fear we should forget him," said the landlord, recovering
himself. "He sometimes nods his head and threatens to come down; but we
are old neighbors, and agree together pretty well upon the whole. Besides we
have a sure place of refuge hard by if he should be coming in good
earnest."
Let us now suppose the stranger to
have finished his supper of bear's meat; and, by his natural felicity of
manner, to have placed himself on a footing of kindness with the whole family,
so that they talked as freely together as if he belonged to their mountain
brood. He was of a proud, yet gentle spirit--haughty and reserved among the
rich and great; but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door, and
be like a brother or a son at the poor man's fireside. In the household of the
Notch he found warmth and simplicity of feeling, the pervading intelligence of
New England, and a poetry of native growth, which they had gathered when they
little thought of it from the mountain peaks and chasms, and at the very
threshold of their romantic and dangerous abode. He had travelled far and
alone; his whole life, indeed, had been a solitary path; for, with the lofty
caution of his nature, he had kept himself apart from those who might otherwise
have been his companions. The family, too, though so kind and hospitable, had
that consciousness of unity among themselves, and separation from the world at
large, which, in every domestic circle, should still keep a holy place where no
stranger may intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled the
refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple
mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same free confidence.
And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred of a common fate a closer tie
than that of birth?
The secret of the young man's
character was a high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an
undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had
been transformed to hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty,
that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway-
though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when posterity should gaze
back into the gloom of what was now the present, they would trace the
brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meaner glories faded, and confess
that a gifted one had passed from his cradle to his tomb with none to recognize
him.
"As yet," cried the
stranger--his cheek glowing and his eye flashing with enthusiasm--"as yet,
I have done nothing. Were I to vanish from the earth tomorrow, none would know
so much of me as you: that a nameless youth came up at nightfall from the
valley of the Saco, and opened his heart to you in the evening, and passed
through the Notch by sunrise, and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, 'Who
was he? Whither did the wanderer go?' But I cannot die till I have achieved my
destiny. Then, let Death come! I shall have built my monument!"
There was a continual flow of
natural emotion, gushing forth amid abstracted reverie, which enabled the
family to understand this young man's sentiments, though so foreign from their
own. With quick sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into
which he had been betrayed.
"You laugh at me," said
he, taking the eldest daughter's hand, and laughing himself. "You think my
ambition as nonsensical as if I were to freeze myself to death on the top of
Mount Washington, only that people might spy at me from the country round
about. And, truly, that would be a noble pedestal for a man's statue!"
"It is better to sit here by
this fire," answered the girl, blushing, "and be comfortable and
contented, though nobody thinks about us."
"I suppose," said her
father, after a fit of musing, "there is something natural in what the young
man says; and if my mind had been turned that way, I might have felt just the
same. It is strange, wife, how his talk has set my head running on things that
are pretty certain never to come to pass."
"Perhaps they may,"
observed the wife. "Is the man thinking what he will do when he is a
widower?"
"No, no!" cried he,
repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. "When I think of your death,
Esther, I think of mine, too. But I was wishing we had a good farm in Bartlett,
or Bethlehem, or Littleton, or some other township round the White Mountains;
but not where they could tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with
my neighbors and be called Squire, and sent to General Court for a term or two;
for a plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I
should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be long
apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all crying around me.
A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble one--with just my name and
age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know that I lived an
honest man and died a Christian."
"There now!" exclaimed the
stranger; "it is our nature to desire a monument, be it slate or marble,
or a pillar of granite, or a glorious memory in the universal heart of
man."
"We're in a strange way,
tonight," said the wife, with tears in her eyes. "They say it's a
sign of something, when folks' minds go a-wandering so. Hark to the
children!"
They listened accordingly. The
younger children had been put to bed in another room, but with an open door
between, so that they could be heard talking busily among themselves. One and
all seemed to have caught the infection from the fireside circle, and were
outvying each other in wild wishes, and childish projects, of what they would
do when they came to be men and women. At length a little boy, instead of
addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.
"I'll tell you what I wish,
mother," cried he. "I want you and father and grandma'm, and all of
us, and the stranger too, to start right away, and go and take a drink out of
the basin of the Flume!"
Nobody could help laughing at the
child's notion of leaving a warm bed, and dragging them from a cheerful fire,
to visit the basin of the Flume--a brook, which tumbles over the precipice,
deep within the Notch. The boy had hardly spoken when a wagon rattled along the
road, and stopped a moment before the door. It appeared to contain two or three
men, who were cheering their hearts with the rough chorus of a song, which
resounded, in broken notes, between the cliffs, while the singers hesitated
whether to continue their journey or put up here for the night.
"Father," said the girl,
"they are calling you by name."
But the good man doubted whether
they had really called him, and was unwilling to show himself too solicitous of
gain by inviting people to patronize his house. He therefore did not hurry to
the door; and the lash being soon applied, the travellers plunged into the
Notch, still singing and laughing, though their music and mirth came back
drearily from the heart of the mountain.
"There, mother!" cried the
boy, again. "They'd have given us a ride to the Flume."
Again they laughed at the child's
pertinacious fancy for a night ramble. But it happened that a light cloud
passed over the daughter's spirit; she looked gravely into the fire, and drew a
breath that was almost a sigh. It forced its way, in spite of a little struggle
to repress it. Then starting and blushing, she looked quickly round the circle,
as if they had caught a glimpse into her bosom. The stranger asked what she had
been thinking of.
"Nothing," answered she,
with a downcast smile. "Only I felt lonesome just then."
"Oh, I have always had a gift
of feeling what is in other people's hearts," said he, half seriously.
"Shall I tell the secrets of yours? For I know what to think when a young
girl shivers by a warm hearth, and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's
side. Shall I put these feelings into words?"
"They would not be a girl's
feelings any longer if they could be put into words," replied the mountain
nymph, laughing, but avoiding his eye.
All this was said apart. Perhaps a
germ of love was springing in their hearts, so pure that it might blossom in
Paradise, since it could not be matured on earth; for women worship such gentle
dignity as his; and the proud, contemplative, yet kindly soul is oftenest
captivated by simplicity like hers. But while they spoke softly, and he was
watching the happy sadness, the lightsome shadows, the shy yearnings of a
maiden's nature, the wind through the Notch took a deeper and drearier sound.
It seemed, as the fanciful stranger said, like the choral strain of the spirits
of the blast, who in old Indian times had their dwelling among these mountains,
and made their heights and recesses a sacred region. There was a wail along the
road, as if a funeral were passing. To chase away the gloom, the family threw
pine branches on their fire, till the dry leaves crackled and the flame arose,
discovering once again a scene of peace and humble happiness. The light hovered
about them fondly, and caressed them all. There were the little faces of the
children, peeping from their bed apart, and here the father's frame of
strength, the mother's subdued and careful mien, the high-browed youth, the
budding girl, and the good old grandam, still knitting in the warmest place.
The aged woman looked up from her task, and, with fingers ever busy, was the
next to speak.
"Old folks have their
notions," said she, "as well as young ones. You've been wishing and
planning; and letting your heads run on one thing and another, till you've set
my mind a-wandering too. Now what should an old woman wish for, when she can go
but a step or two before she comes to her grave? Children, it will haunt me
night and day till I tell you."
"What is it, mother?"
cried the husband and wife at once.
Then the old woman, with an air of
mystery which drew the circle closer round the fire, informed them that she had
provided her grave-clothes some years before--a nice linen shroud, a cap with a
muslin ruff, and everything of a finer sort than she had worn since her wedding
day. But this evening an old superstition had strangely recurred to her. It
used to be said, in her younger days, that if anything were amiss with a
corpse, if only the ruff were not smooth, or the cap did not set right, the
corpse in the coffin and beneath the clods would strive to put up its cold
hands and arrange it. The bare thought made her nervous.
"Don't talk so, grandmother!"
said the girl, shuddering.
"Now," continued the old
woman, with singular earnestness, yet smiling strangely at her own folly,
"I want one of you, my children- when your mother is dressed and in the
coffin--I want one of you to hold a looking-glass over my face. Who knows but I
may take a glimpse at myself, and see whether all's right?"
"Old and young, we dream of
graves and monuments," murmured the stranger youth. "I wonder how
mariners feel when the ship is sinking, and they, unknown and undistinguished,
are to be buried together in the ocean--that wide and nameless sepulchre?"
For a moment, the old woman's
ghastly conception so engrossed the minds of her hearers that a sound abroad in
the night, rising like the roar of a blast, had grown broad, deep, and
terrible, before the fated group were conscious of it. The house and all within
it trembled; the foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful
sound were the peal of the last trump. Young and old exchanged one wild glance,
and remained an instant, pale, affrighted, without utterance, or power to move.
Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all their lips.
"The Slide! The Slide!"
The simplest words must intimate,
but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed
from their cottage, and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot--where,
in contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas!
they had quitted their security, and fled right into the pathway of destruction.
Down came the whole side of the mountain, in a cataract of ruin. Just before it
reached the house, the stream broke into two branches--shivered not a window
there, but overwhelmed the whole vicinity, blocked up the road, and annihilated
everything in its dreadful course. Long ere the thunder of the great Slide had
ceased to roar among the mountains, the mortal agony had been endured, and the
victims were at peace. Their bodies were never found.
The next morning, the light smoke
was seen stealing from the cottage chimney up the mountain side. Within, the
fire was yet smouldering on the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as
if the inhabitants had but gone forth to view the devastation of the Slide, and
would shortly return, to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape. All had left
separate tokens, by which those who had known the family were made to shed a
tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has been told far and
wide, and will forever be a legend of these mountains. Poets have sung their
fate.
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