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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Snow Image, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Snow Image
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Posting Date: October 10, 2008 [EBook #513]
+Release Date: May, 1996
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SNOW IMAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SNOW IMAGE
+
+
+by
+
+Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+  The Snow Image: A Childish Miracle
+  The Great Stone Face
+  Ethan Brand
+  The Canterbury Pilgrims
+  The Devil in Manuscript
+  My Kinsman, Major Molineux
+
+
+
+
+
+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 beer 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.
+
+
+
+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 limeburner 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.
+
+
+
+THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS
+
+The summer moon, which shines in so many a tale, was beaming over a
+broad extent of uneven country. Some of its brightest rays were flung
+into a spring of water, where no traveller, toiling, as the writer has,
+up the hilly road beside which it gushes, ever failed to quench his
+thirst. The work of neat hands and considerate art was visible about
+this blessed fountain. An open cistern, hewn and hollowed out of solid
+stone, was placed above the waters, which filled it to the brim, but by
+some invisible outlet were conveyed away without dripping down its
+sides. Though the basin had not room for another drop, and the
+continual gush of water made a tremor on the surface, there was a
+secret charm that forbade it to overflow. I remember, that when I had
+slaked my summer thirst, and sat panting by the cistern, it was my
+fanciful theory that Nature could not afford to lavish so pure a
+liquid, as she does the waters of all meaner fountains.
+
+While the moon was hanging almost perpendicularly over this spot, two
+figures appeared on the summit of the hill, and came with noiseless
+footsteps down towards the spring. They were then in the first
+freshness of youth; nor is there a wrinkle now on either of their
+brows, and yet they wore a strange, old-fashioned garb. One, a young
+man with ruddy cheeks, walked beneath the canopy of a broad-brimmed
+gray hat; he seemed to have inherited his great-grandsire's
+square-skirted coat, and a waistcoat that extended its immense flaps to
+his knees; his brown locks, also, hung down behind, in a mode unknown
+to our times. By his side was a sweet young damsel, her fair features
+sheltered by a prim little bonnet, within which appeared the vestal
+muslin of a cap; her close, long-waisted gown, and indeed her whole
+attire, might have been worn by some rustic beauty who had faded half a
+century before. But that there was something too warm and life-like in
+them, I would here have compared this couple to the ghosts of two young
+lovers who had died long since in the glow of passion, and now were
+straying out of their graves, to renew the old vows, and shadow forth
+the unforgotten kiss of their earthly lips, beside the moonlit spring.
+
+"Thee and I will rest here a moment, Miriam," said the young man, as
+they drew near the stone cistern, "for there is no fear that the elders
+know what we have done; and this may be the last time we shall ever
+taste this water."
+
+Thus speaking, with a little sadness in his face, which was also
+visible in that of his companion, he made her sit down on a stone, and
+was about to place himself very close to her side; she, however,
+repelled him, though not unkindly.
+
+"Nay, Josiah," said she, giving him a timid push with her maiden hand,
+"thee must sit farther off, on that other stone, with the spring
+between us. What would the sisters say, if thee were to sit so close to
+me?"
+
+"But we are of the world's people now, Miriam," answered Josiah.
+
+The girl persisted in her prudery, nor did the youth, in fact, seem
+altogether free from a similar sort of shyness; so they sat apart from
+each other, gazing up the hill, where the moonlight discovered the tops
+of a group of buildings. While their attention was thus occupied, a
+party of travellers, who had come wearily up the long ascent, made a
+halt to refresh themselves at the spring. There were three men, a
+woman, and a little girl and boy. Their attire was mean, covered with
+the dust of the summer's day, and damp with the night-dew; they all
+looked woebegone, as if the cares and sorrows of the world had made
+their steps heavier as they climbed the hill; even the two little
+children appeared older in evil days than the young man and maiden who
+had first approached the spring.
+
+"Good evening to you, young folks," was the salutation of the
+travellers; and "Good evening, friends," replied the youth and damsel.
+
+"Is that white building the Shaker meeting-house?" asked one of the
+strangers. "And are those the red roofs of the Shaker village?"
+
+"Friend, it is the Shaker village," answered Josiah, after some
+hesitation.
+
+The travellers, who, from the first, had looked suspiciously at the
+garb of these young people, now taxed them with an intention which all
+the circumstances, indeed, rendered too obvious to be mistaken.
+
+"It is true, friends," replied the young man, summoning up his courage.
+"Miriam and I have a gift to love each other, and we are going among
+the world's people, to live after their fashion. And ye know that we do
+not transgress the law of the land; and neither ye, nor the elders
+themselves, have a right to hinder us."
+
+"Yet you think it expedient to depart without leave-taking," remarked
+one of the travellers.
+
+"Yea, ye-a," said Josiah, reluctantly, "because father Job is a very
+awful man to speak with; and being aged himself, he has but little
+charity for what he calls the iniquities of the flesh."
+
+"Well," said the stranger, "we will neither use force to bring you back
+to the village, nor will we betray you to the elders. But sit you here
+awhile, and when you have heard what we shall tell you of the world
+which we have left, and into which you are going, perhaps you will turn
+back with us of your own accord. What say you?" added he, turning to
+his companions. "We have travelled thus far without becoming known to
+each other. Shall we tell our stories, here by this pleasant spring,
+for our own pastime, and the benefit of these misguided young lovers?"
+
+In accordance with this proposal, the whole party stationed themselves
+round the stone cistern; the two children, being very weary, fell
+asleep upon the damp earth, and the pretty Shaker girl, whose feelings
+were those of a nun or a Turkish lady, crept as close as possible to
+the female traveller, and as far as she well could from the unknown
+men. The same person who had hitherto been the chief spokesman now
+stood up, waving his hat in his hand, and suffered the moonlight to
+fall full upon his front.
+
+"In me," said he, with a certain majesty of utterance,--"in me, you
+behold a poet."
+
+Though a lithographic print of this gentleman is extant, it may be well
+to notice that he was now nearly forty, a thin and stooping figure, in
+a black coat, out at elbows; notwithstanding the ill condition of his
+attire, there were about him several tokens of a peculiar sort of
+foppery, unworthy of a mature man, particularly in the arrangement of
+his hair which was so disposed as to give all possible loftiness and
+breadth to his forehead. However, he had an intelligent eye, and, on
+the whole, a marked countenance.
+
+"A poet!" repeated the young Shaker, a little puzzled how to understand
+such a designation, seldom heard in the utilitarian community where he
+had spent his life. "Oh, ay, Miriam, he means a varse-maker, thee must
+know."
+
+This remark jarred upon the susceptible nerves of the poet; nor could
+he help wondering what strange fatality had put into this young man's
+mouth an epithet, which ill-natured people had affirmed to be more
+proper to his merit than the one assumed by himself.
+
+"True, I am a verse-maker," he resumed, "but my verse is no more than
+the material body into which I breathe the celestial soul of thought.
+Alas! how many a pang has it cost me, this same insensibility to the
+ethereal essence of poetry, with which you have here tortured me again,
+at the moment when I am to relinquish my profession forever! O Fate!
+why hast thou warred with Nature, turning all her higher and more
+perfect gifts to the ruin of me, their possessor? What is the voice of
+song, when the world lacks the ear of taste? How can I rejoice in my
+strength and delicacy of feeling, when they have but made great sorrows
+out of little ones? Have I dreaded scorn like death, and yearned for
+fame as others pant for vital air, only to find myself in a middle
+state between obscurity and infamy? But I have my revenge! I could have
+given existence to a thousand bright creations. I crush them into my
+heart, and there let them putrefy! I shake off the dust of my feet
+against my countrymen! But posterity, tracing my footsteps up this
+weary hill, will cry shame upon the unworthy age that drove one of the
+fathers of American song to end his days in a Shaker village!"
+
+During this harangue, the speaker gesticulated with great energy, and,
+as poetry is the natural language of passion, there appeared reason to
+apprehend his final explosion into an ode extempore. The reader must
+understand that, for all these bitter words, he was a kind, gentle,
+harmless, poor fellow enough, whom Nature, tossing her ingredients
+together without looking at her recipe, had sent into the world with
+too much of one sort of brain, and hardly any of another.
+
+"Friend," said the young Shaker, in some perplexity, "thee seemest to
+have met with great troubles; and, doubtless, I should pity them,
+if--if I could but understand what they were."
+
+"Happy in your ignorance!" replied the poet, with an air of sublime
+superiority. "To your coarser mind, perhaps, I may seem to speak of
+more important griefs when I add, what I had well-nigh forgotten, that
+I am out at elbows, and almost starved to death. At any rate, you have
+the advice and example of one individual to warn you back; for I am
+come hither, a disappointed man, flinging aside the fragments of my
+hopes, and seeking shelter in the calm retreat which you are so anxious
+to leave."
+
+"I thank thee, friend," rejoined the youth, "but I do not mean to be a
+poet, nor, Heaven be praised! do I think Miriam ever made a varse in
+her life. So we need not fear thy disappointments. But, Miriam," he
+added, with real concern, "thee knowest that the elders admit nobody
+that has not a gift to be useful. Now, what under the sun can they do
+with this poor varse-maker?"
+
+"Nay, Josiah, do not thee discourage the poor man," said the girl, in
+all simplicity and kindness. "Our hymns are very rough, and perhaps
+they may trust him to smooth them."
+
+Without noticing this hint of professional employment, the poet turned
+away, and gave himself up to a sort of vague reverie, which he called
+thought. Sometimes he watched the moon, pouring a silvery liquid on the
+clouds, through which it slowly melted till they became all bright;
+then he saw the same sweet radiance dancing on the leafy trees which
+rustled as if to shake it off, or sleeping on the high tops of hills,
+or hovering down in distant valleys, like the material of unshaped
+dreams; lastly, he looked into the spring, and there the light was
+mingling with the water. In its crystal bosom, too, beholding all
+heaven reflected there, he found an emblem of a pure and tranquil
+breast. He listened to that most ethereal of all sounds, the song of
+crickets, coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if
+moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he
+took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true
+Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his
+Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that
+an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or
+three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first
+opportunity to send, by one of the Shaker brethren, to Concord, where
+they were published in the New Hampshire Patriot.
+
+Meantime, another of the Canterbury pilgrims, one so different from the
+poet that the delicate fancy of the latter could hardly have conceived
+of him, began to relate his sad experience. He was a small man, of
+quick and unquiet gestures, about fifty years old, with a narrow
+forehead, all wrinkled and drawn together. He held in his hand a
+pencil, and a card of some commission-merchant in foreign parts, on the
+back of which, for there was light enough to read or write by, he
+seemed ready to figure out a calculation.
+
+"Young man," said he, abruptly, "what quantity of land do the Shakers
+own here, in Canterbury?"
+
+"That is more than I can tell thee, friend," answered Josiah, "but it
+is a very rich establishment, and for a long way by the roadside thee
+may guess the land to be ours, by the neatness of the fences."
+
+"And what may be the value of the whole," continued the stranger, "with
+all the buildings and improvements, pretty nearly, in round numbers?"
+
+"Oh, a monstrous sum,--more than I can reckon," replied the young
+Shaker.
+
+"Well, sir," said the pilgrim, "there was a day, and not very long ago,
+neither, when I stood at my counting-room window, and watched the
+signal flags of three of my own ships entering the harbor, from the
+East Indies, from Liverpool, and from up the Straits, and I would not
+have given the invoice of the least of them for the title-deeds of this
+whole Shaker settlement. You stare. Perhaps, now, you won't believe
+that I could have put more value on a little piece of paper, no bigger
+than the palm of your hand, than all these solid acres of grain, grass,
+and pasture-land would sell for?"
+
+"I won't dispute it, friend," answered Josiah, "but I know I had rather
+have fifty acres of this good land than a whole sheet of thy paper."
+
+"You may say so now," said the ruined merchant, bitterly, "for my name
+would not be worth the paper I should write it on. Of course, you must
+have heard of my failure?"
+
+And the stranger mentioned his name, which, however mighty it might
+have been in the commercial world, the young Shaker had never heard of
+among the Canterbury hills.
+
+"Not heard of my failure!" exclaimed the merchant, considerably piqued.
+"Why, it was spoken of on 'Change in London, and from Boston to New
+Orleans men trembled in their shoes. At all events, I did fail, and you
+see me here on my road to the Shaker village, where, doubtless (for the
+Shakers are a shrewd sect), they will have a due respect for my
+experience, and give me the management of the trading part of the
+concern, in which case I think I can pledge myself to double their
+capital in four or five years. Turn back with me, young man; for though
+you will never meet with my good luck, you can hardly escape my bad."
+
+"I will not turn back for this," replied Josiah, calmly, "any more than
+for the advice of the varse-maker, between whom and thee, friend, I see
+a sort of likeness, though I can't justly say where it lies. But Miriam
+and I can earn our daily bread among the world's people as well as in
+the Shaker village. And do we want anything more, Miriam?"
+
+"Nothing more, Josiah," said the girl, quietly.
+
+"Yea, Miriam, and daily bread for some other little mouths, if God send
+them," observed the simple Shaker lad.
+
+Miriam did not reply, but looked down into the spring, where she
+encountered the image of her own pretty face, blushing within the prim
+little bonnet. The third pilgrim now took up the conversation. He was a
+sunburnt countryman, of tall frame and bony strength, on whose rude and
+manly face there appeared a darker, more sullen and obstinate
+despondency, than on those of either the poet or the merchant.
+
+"Well, now, youngster," he began, "these folks have had their say, so
+I'll take my turn. My story will cut but a poor figure by the side of
+theirs; for I never supposed that I could have a right to meat and
+drink, and great praise besides, only for tagging rhymes together, as
+it seems this man does; nor ever tried to get the substance of hundreds
+into my own hands, like the trader there. When I was about of your
+years, I married me a wife,--just such a neat and pretty young woman as
+Miriam, if that's her name,--and all I asked of Providence was an
+ordinary blessing on the sweat of my brow, so that we might be decent
+and comfortable, and have daily bread for ourselves, and for some other
+little mouths that we soon had to feed. We had no very great prospects
+before us; but I never wanted to be idle; and I thought it a matter of
+course that the Lord would help me, because I was willing to help
+myself."
+
+"And didn't He help thee, friend?" demanded Josiah, with some eagerness.
+
+"No," said the yeoman, sullenly; "for then you would not have seen me
+here. I have labored hard for years; and my means have been growing
+narrower, and my living poorer, and my heart colder and heavier, all
+the time; till at last I could bear it no longer. I set myself down to
+calculate whether I had best go on the Oregon expedition, or come here
+to the Shaker village; but I had not hope enough left in me to begin
+the world over again; and, to make my story short, here I am. And now,
+youngster, take my advice, and turn back; or else, some few years
+hence, you'll have to climb this hill, with as heavy a heart as mine."
+
+This simple story had a strong effect on the young fugitives. The
+misfortunes of the poet and merchant had won little sympathy from their
+plain good sense and unworldly feelings, qualities which made them such
+unprejudiced and inflexible judges, that few men would have chosen to
+take the opinion of this youth and maiden as to the wisdom or folly of
+their pursuits. But here was one whose simple wishes had resembled
+their own, and who, after efforts which almost gave him a right to
+claim success from fate, had failed in accomplishing them.
+
+"But thy wife, friend?" exclaimed the younger man. "What became of the
+pretty girl, like Miriam? Oh, I am afraid she is dead!"
+
+"Yea, poor man, she must be dead,--she and the children, too," sobbed
+Miriam.
+
+The female pilgrim had been leaning over the spring, wherein latterly a
+tear or two might have been seen to fall, and form its little circle on
+the surface of the water. She now looked up, disclosing features still
+comely, but which had acquired an expression of fretfulness, in the
+same long course of evil fortune that had thrown a sullen gloom over
+the temper of the unprosperous yeoman.
+
+"I am his wife," said she, a shade of irritability just perceptible in
+the sadness of her tone. "These poor little things, asleep on the
+ground, are two of our children. We had two more, but God has provided
+better for them than we could, by taking them to Himself."
+
+"And what would thee advise Josiah and me to do?" asked Miriam, this
+being the first question which she had put to either of the strangers.
+
+"'Tis a thing almost against nature for a woman to try to part true
+lovers," answered the yeoman's wife, after a pause; "but I'll speak as
+truly to you as if these were my dying words. Though my husband told
+you some of our troubles, he didn't mention the greatest, and that
+which makes all the rest so hard to bear. If you and your sweetheart
+marry, you'll be kind and pleasant to each other for a year or two, and
+while that's the case, you never will repent; but, by and by, he'll
+grow gloomy, rough, and hard to please, and you'll be peevish, and full
+of little angry fits, and apt to be complaining by the fireside, when
+he comes to rest himself from his troubles out of doors; so your love
+will wear away by little and little, and leave you miserable at last.
+It has been so with us; and yet my husband and I were true lovers once,
+if ever two young folks were ."
+
+As she ceased, the yeoman and his wife exchanged a glance, in which
+there was more and warmer affection than they had supposed to have
+escaped the frost of a wintry fate, in either of their breasts. At that
+moment, when they stood on the utmost verge of married life, one word
+fitly spoken, or perhaps one peculiar look, had they had mutual
+confidence enough to reciprocate it, might have renewed all their old
+feelings, and sent them back, resolved to sustain each other amid the
+struggles of the world. But the crisis passed and never came again.
+Just then, also, the children, roused by their mother's voice, looked
+up, and added their wailing accents to the testimony borne by all the
+Canterbury pilgrims against the world from which they fled.
+
+"We are tired and hungry!" cried they. "Is it far to the Shaker
+village?"
+
+The Shaker youth and maiden looked mournfully into each other's eyes.
+They had but stepped across the threshold of their homes, when lo! the
+dark array of cares and sorrows that rose up to warn them back. The
+varied narratives of the strangers had arranged themselves into a
+parable; they seemed not merely instances of woful fate that had
+befallen others, but shadowy omens of disappointed hope and unavailing
+toil, domestic grief and estranged affection, that would cloud the
+onward path of these poor fugitives. But after one instant's
+hesitation, they opened their arms, and sealed their resolve with as
+pure and fond an embrace as ever youthful love had hallowed.
+
+"We will not go back," said they. "The world never can be dark to us,
+for we will always love one another."
+
+Then the Canterbury pilgrims went up the hill, while the poet chanted a
+drear and desperate stanza of the Farewell to his Harp, fitting music
+for that melancholy band. They sought a home where all former ties of
+nature or society would be sundered, and all old distinctions levelled,
+and a cold and passionless security be substituted for mortal hope and
+fear, as in that other refuge of the world's weary outcasts, the grave.
+The lovers drank at the Shaker spring, and then, with chastened hopes,
+but more confiding affections, went on to mingle in an untried life.
+
+
+
+THE DEVIL IN MANUSCRIPT
+
+On a bitter evening of December, I arrived by mail in a large town,
+which was then the residence of an intimate friend, one of those gifted
+youths who cultivate poetry and the belles-lettres, and call themselves
+students at law. My first business, after supper, was to visit him at
+the office of his distinguished instructor. As I have said, it was a
+bitter night, clear starlight, but cold as Nova Zembla,--the
+shop-windows along the street being frosted, so as almost to hide the
+lights, while the wheels of coaches thundered equally loud over frozen
+earth and pavements of stone. There was no snow, either on the ground
+or the roofs of the houses. The wind blew so violently, that I had but
+to spread my cloak like a main-sail, and scud along the street at the
+rate of ten knots, greatly envied by other navigators, who were beating
+slowly up, with the gale right in their teeth. One of these I capsized,
+but was gone on the wings of the wind before he could even vociferate
+an oath.
+
+After this picture of an inclement night, behold us seated by a great
+blazing fire, which looked so comfortable and delicious that I felt
+inclined to lie down and roll among the hot coals. The usual furniture
+of a lawyer's office was around us,--rows of volumes in sheepskin, and
+a multitude of writs, summonses, and other legal papers, scattered over
+the desks and tables. But there were certain objects which seemed to
+intimate that we had little dread of the intrusion of clients, or of
+the learned counsellor himself, who, indeed, was attending court in a
+distant town. A tall, decanter-shaped bottle stood on the table,
+between two tumblers, and beside a pile of blotted manuscripts,
+altogether dissimilar to any law documents recognized in our courts. My
+friend, whom I shall call Oberon,--it was a name of fancy and
+friendship between him and me,--my friend Oberon looked at these papers
+with a peculiar expression of disquietude.
+
+"I do believe," said he, soberly, "or, at least, I could believe, if I
+chose, that there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers. You have
+read them, and know what I mean,--that conception in which I endeavored
+to embody the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions
+and the written records of witchcraft. Oh, I have a horror of what was
+created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave
+that dark idea a sort of material existence! Would they were out of my
+sight!"
+
+"And of mine, too," thought I.
+
+"You remember," continued Oberon, "how the hellish thing used to suck
+away the happiness of those who, by a simple concession that seemed
+almost innocent, subjected themselves to his power. Just so my peace is
+gone, and all by these accursed manuscripts. Have you felt nothing of
+the same influence?"
+
+"Nothing," replied I, "unless the spell be hid in a desire to turn
+novelist, after reading your delightful tales."
+
+"Novelist!" exclaimed Oberon, half seriously. "Then, indeed, my devil
+has his claw on you! You are gone! You cannot even pray for
+deliverance! But we will be the last and only victims; for this night I
+mean to burn the manuscripts, and commit the fiend to his retribution
+in the flames."
+
+"Burn your tales!" repeated I, startled at the desperation of the idea.
+
+"Even so," said the author, despondingly. "You cannot conceive what an
+effect the composition of these tales has had on me. I have become
+ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation. I am
+surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by aping the
+realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the
+world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude,--a solitude in the
+midst of men,-where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels
+as I do. The tales have done all this. When they are ashes, perhaps I
+shall be as I was before they had existence. Moreover, the sacrifice is
+less than you may suppose, since nobody will publish them."
+
+"That does make a difference, indeed," said I.
+
+"They have been offered, by letter," continued Oberon, reddening with
+vexation, "to some seventeen booksellers. It would make you stare to
+read their answers; and read them you should, only that I burnt them as
+fast as they arrived. One man publishes nothing but school-books;
+another has five novels already under examination."
+
+"What a voluminous mass the unpublished literature of America must be!"
+cried I.
+
+"Oh, the Alexandrian manuscripts were nothing to it!" said my friend.
+"Well, another gentleman is just giving up business, on purpose, I
+verily believe, to escape publishing my book. Several, however, would
+not absolutely decline the agency, on my advancing half the cost of an
+edition, and giving bonds for the remainder, besides a high percentage
+to themselves, whether the book sells or not. Another advises a
+subscription."
+
+"The villain!" exclaimed I.
+
+"A fact!" said Oberon. "In short, of all the seventeen booksellers,
+only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he--a literary
+dabbler himself, I should judge--has the impertinence to criticise
+them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after
+a general sentence of condemnation, with the definitive assurance that
+he will not be concerned on any terms."
+
+"It might not be amiss to pull that fellow's nose," remarked I.
+
+"If the whole 'trade' had one common nose, there would be some
+satisfaction in pulling it," answered the author. "But, there does seem
+to be one honest man among these seventeen unrighteous ones; and he
+tells me fairly, that no American publisher will meddle with an
+American work,--seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new
+one,--unless at the writer's risk."
+
+"The paltry rogues!" cried I. "Will they live by literature, and yet
+risk nothing for its sake? But, after all, you might publish on your
+own account."
+
+"And so I might," replied Oberon. "But the devil of the business is
+this. These people have put me so out of conceit with the tales, that I
+loathe the very thought of them, and actually experience a physical
+sickness of the stomach, whenever I glance at them on the table. I tell
+you there is a demon in them! I anticipate a wild enjoyment in seeing
+them in the blaze; such as I should feel in taking vengeance on an
+enemy, or destroying something noxious."
+
+I did not very strenuously oppose this determination, being privately
+of opinion, in spite of my partiality for the author, that his tales
+would make a more brilliant appearance in the fire than anywhere else.
+Before proceeding to execution, we broached the bottle of champagne,
+which Oberon had provided for keeping up his spirits in this doleful
+business. We swallowed each a tumblerful, in sparkling commotion; it
+went bubbling down our throats, and brightened my eyes at once, but
+left my friend sad and heavy as before. He drew the tales towards him,
+with a mixture of natural affection and natural disgust, like a father
+taking a deformed infant into his arms.
+
+"Pooh! Pish! Pshaw!" exclaimed he, holding them at arm's-length. "It
+was Gray's idea of heaven, to lounge on a sofa and read new novels.
+Now, what more appropriate torture would Dante himself have contrived,
+for the sinner who perpetrates a bad book, than to be continually
+turning over the manuscript?"
+
+"It would fail of effect," said I, "because a bad author is always his
+own great admirer."
+
+"I lack that one characteristic of my tribe,--the only desirable one,"
+observed Oberon. "But how many recollections throng upon me, as I turn
+over these leaves! This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a
+hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing
+air, I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a
+race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale, in which I wrapt myself
+during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the
+rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like
+faint sounds of a dream, and my visions a bright reality. That
+scribbled page describes shadows which I summoned to my bedside at
+midnight: they would not depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came,
+and found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own
+enchantments!"
+
+"There must have been a sort of happiness in all this," said I, smitten
+with a strange longing to make proof of it.
+
+"There may be happiness in a fever fit," replied the author. "And then
+the various moods in which I wrote! Sometimes my ideas were like
+precious stones under the earth, requiring toil to dig them up, and
+care to polish and brighten them; but often a delicious stream of
+thought would gush out upon the page at once, like water sparkling up
+suddenly in the desert; and when it had passed, I gnawed my pen
+hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and miserable toil, as if there
+were a wall of ice between me and my subject."
+
+"Do you now perceive a corresponding difference," inquired I, "between
+the passages which you wrote so coldly, and those fervid flashes of the
+mind?"
+
+"No," said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. "I find no
+traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My
+treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture,
+painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded
+and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and
+humorous in a dream,--and behold! it is all nonsense, now that I am
+awake."
+
+My friend now threw sticks of wood and dry chips upon the fire, and
+seeing it blaze like Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, seized the champagne
+bottle, and drank two or three brimming bumpers, successively. The
+heady liquor combined with his agitation to throw him into a species of
+rage. He laid violent hands on the tales. In one instant more, their
+faults and beauties would alike have vanished in a glowing purgatory.
+But, all at once, I remembered passages of high imagination, deep
+pathos, original thoughts, and points of such varied excellence, that
+the vastness of the sacrifice struck me most forcibly. I caught his arm.
+
+"Surely, you do not mean to burn them!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Let me alone!" cried Oberon, his eyes flashing fire. "I will burn
+them! Not a scorched syllable shall escape! Would you have me a damned
+author?--To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint
+praise, bestowed, for pity's sake, against the giver's conscience! A
+hissing and a laughing-stock to my own traitorous thoughts! An outlaw
+from the protection of the grave,--one whose ashes every careless foot
+might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death! Am
+I to bear all this, when yonder fire will insure me from the whole? No!
+There go the tales! May my hand wither when it would write another!"
+
+The deed was done. He had thrown the manuscripts into the hottest of
+the fire, which at first seemed to shrink away, but soon curled around
+them, and made them a part of its own fervent brightness. Oberon stood
+gazing at the conflagration, and shortly began to soliloquize, in the
+wildest strain, as if Fancy resisted and became riotous, at the moment
+when he would have compelled her to ascend that funeral pile. His words
+described objects which he appeared to discern in the fire, fed by his
+own precious thoughts; perhaps the thousand visions which the writer's
+magic had incorporated with these pages became visible to him in the
+dissolving heat, brightening forth ere they vanished forever; while the
+smoke, the vivid sheets of flame, the ruddy and whitening coals, caught
+the aspect of a varied scenery.
+
+"They blaze," said he, "as if I had steeped them in the intensest
+spirit of genius. There I see my lovers clasped in each other's arms.
+How pure the flame that bursts from their glowing hearts! And yonder
+the features of a villain writhing in the fire that shall torment him
+to eternity. My holy men, my pious and angelic women, stand like
+martyrs amid the flames, their mild eyes lifted heavenward. Ring out
+the bells! A city is on fire. See!--destruction roars through my dark
+forests, while the lakes boil up in steaming billows, and the mountains
+are volcanoes, and the sky kindles with a lurid brightness! All
+elements are but one pervading flame! Ha! The fiend!"
+
+I was somewhat startled by this latter exclamation. The tales were
+almost consumed, but just then threw forth a broad sheet of fire, which
+flickered as with laughter, making the whole room dance in its
+brightness, and then roared portentously up the chimney.
+
+"You saw him? You must have seen him!" cried Oberon. "How he glared at
+me and laughed, in that last sheet of flame, with just the features
+that I imagined for him! Well! The tales are gone."
+
+The papers were indeed reduced to a heap of black cinders, with a
+multitude of sparks hurrying confusedly among them, the traces of the
+pen being now represented by white lines, and the whole mass fluttering
+to and fro in the draughts of air. The destroyer knelt down to look at
+them.
+
+"What is more potent than fire!" said he, in his gloomiest tone. "Even
+thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape it. In this
+little time, it has annihilated the creations of long nights and days,
+which I could no more reproduce, in their first glow and freshness,
+than cause ashes and whitened bones to rise up and live. There, too, I
+sacrificed the unborn children of my mind. All that I had
+accomplished--all that I planned for future years--has perished by one
+common ruin, and left only this heap of embers! The deed has been my
+fate. And what remains? A weary and aimless life,--a long repentance of
+this hour,--and at last an obscure grave, where they will bury and
+forget me!"
+
+As the author concluded his dolorous moan, the extinguished embers
+arose and settled down and arose again, and finally flew up the
+chimney, like a demon with sable wings. Just as they disappeared, there
+was a loud and solitary cry in the street below us. "Fire!" Fire! Other
+voices caught up that terrible word, and it speedily became the shout
+of a multitude. Oberon started to his feet, in fresh excitement.
+
+"A fire on such a night!" cried he. "The wind blows a gale, and
+wherever it whirls the flames, the roofs will flash up like gunpowder.
+Every pump is frozen up, and boiling water would turn to ice the moment
+it was flung from the engine. In an hour, this wooden town will be one
+great bonfire! What a glorious scene for my next--Pshaw!"
+
+The street was now all alive with footsteps, and the air full of
+voices. We heard one engine thundering round a corner, and another
+rattling from a distance over the pavements. The bells of three
+steeples clanged out at once, spreading the alarm to many a neighboring
+town, and expressing hurry, confusion, and terror, so inimitably that I
+could almost distinguish in their peal the burden of the universal
+cry,--"Fire! Fire! Fire!"
+
+"What is so eloquent as their iron tongues!" exclaimed Oberon. "My
+heart leaps and trembles, but not with fear. And that other sound,
+too,--deep and awful as a mighty organ,--the roar and thunder of the
+multitude on the pavement below! Come! We are losing time. I will cry
+out in the loudest of the uproar, and mingle my spirit with the wildest
+of the confusion, and be a bubble on the top of the ferment!"
+
+From the first outcry, my forebodings had warned me of the true object
+and centre of alarm. There was nothing now but uproar, above, beneath,
+and around us; footsteps stumbling pell-mell up the public staircase,
+eager shouts and heavy thumps at the door, the whiz and dash of water
+from the engines, and the crash of furniture thrown upon the pavement.
+At once, the truth flashed upon my friend. His frenzy took the hue of
+joy, and, with a wild gesture of exultation, he leaped almost to the
+ceiling of the chamber.
+
+"My tales!" cried Oberon. "The chimney! The roof! The Fiend has gone
+forth by night, and startled thousands in fear and wonder from their
+beds! Here I stand,--a triumphant author! Huzza! Huzza! My brain has
+set the town on fire! Huzza!"
+
+
+
+MY KINSMAN, MAJOR MOLINEUX
+
+After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing
+the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the
+ready and generous approbation which had been paid to those of their
+predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most
+jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power which did not emanate from
+themselves, and they usually rewarded their rulers with slender
+gratitude for the compliances by which, in softening their instructions
+from beyond the sea, they had incurred the reprehension of those who
+gave them. The annals of Massachusetts Bay will inform us, that of six
+governors in the space of about forty years from the surrender of the
+old charter, under James II, two were imprisoned by a popular
+insurrection; a third, as Hutchinson inclines to believe, was driven
+from the province by the whizzing of a musket-ball; a fourth, in the
+opinion of the same historian, was hastened to his grave by continual
+bickerings with the House of Representatives; and the remaining two, as
+well as their successors, till the Revolution, were favored with few
+and brief intervals of peaceful sway. The inferior members of the court
+party, in times of high political excitement, led scarcely a more
+desirable life. These remarks may serve as a preface to the following
+adventures, which chanced upon a summer night, not far from a hundred
+years ago. The reader, in order to avoid a long and dry detail of
+colonial affairs, is requested to dispense with an account of the train
+of circumstances that had caused much temporary inflammation of the
+popular mind.
+
+It was near nine o'clock of a moonlight evening, when a boat crossed
+the ferry with a single passenger, who had obtained his conveyance at
+that unusual hour by the promise of an extra fare. While he stood on
+the landing-place, searching in either pocket for the means of
+fulfilling his agreement, the ferryman lifted a lantern, by the aid of
+which, and the newly risen moon, he took a very accurate survey of the
+stranger's figure. He was a youth of barely eighteen years, evidently
+country-bred, and now, as it should seem, upon his first visit to town.
+He was clad in a coarse gray coat, well worn, but in excellent repair;
+his under garments were durably constructed of leather, and fitted
+tight to a pair of serviceable and well-shaped limbs; his stockings of
+blue yarn were the incontrovertible work of a mother or a sister; and
+on his head was a three-cornered hat, which in its better days had
+perhaps sheltered the graver brow of the lad's father. Under his left
+arm was a heavy cudgel formed of an oak sapling, and retaining a part
+of the hardened root; and his equipment was completed by a wallet, not
+so abundantly stocked as to incommode the vigorous shoulders on which
+it hung. Brown, curly hair, well-shaped features, and bright, cheerful
+eyes were nature's gifts, and worth all that art could have done for
+his adornment.
+
+The youth, one of whose names was Robin, finally drew from his pocket
+the half of a little province bill of five shillings, which, in the
+depreciation in that sort of currency, did but satisfy the ferryman's
+demand, with the surplus of a sexangular piece of parchment, valued at
+three pence. He then walked forward into the town, with as light a step
+as if his day's journey had not already exceeded thirty miles, and with
+as eager an eye as if he were entering London city, instead of the
+little metropolis of a New England colony. Before Robin had proceeded
+far, however, it occurred to him that he knew not whither to direct his
+steps; so he paused, and looked up and down the narrow street,
+scrutinizing the small and mean wooden buildings that were scattered on
+either side.
+
+"This low hovel cannot be my kinsman's dwelling," thought he, "nor
+yonder old house, where the moonlight enters at the broken casement;
+and truly I see none hereabouts that might be worthy of him. It would
+have been wise to inquire my way of the ferryman, and doubtless he
+would have gone with me, and earned a shilling from the Major for his
+pains. But the next man I meet will do as well."
+
+He resumed his walk, and was glad to perceive that the street now
+became wider, and the houses more respectable in their appearance. He
+soon discerned a figure moving on moderately in advance, and hastened
+his steps to overtake it. As Robin drew nigh, he saw that the passenger
+was a man in years, with a full periwig of gray hair, a wide-skirted
+coat of dark cloth, and silk stockings rolled above his knees. He
+carried a long and polished cane, which he struck down perpendicularly
+before him at every step; and at regular intervals he uttered two
+successive hems, of a peculiarly solemn and sepulchral intonation.
+Having made these observations, Robin laid hold of the skirt of the old
+man's coat just when the light from the open door and windows of a
+barber's shop fell upon both their figures.
+
+"Good evening to you, honored sir," said he, making a low bow, and
+still retaining his hold of the skirt. "I pray you tell me whereabouts
+is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux."
+
+The youth's question was uttered very loudly; and one of the barbers,
+whose razor was descending on a well-soaped chin, and another who was
+dressing a Ramillies wig, left their occupations, and came to the door.
+The citizen, in the mean time, turned a long-favored countenance upon
+Robin, and answered him in a tone of excessive anger and annoyance. His
+two sepulchral hems, however, broke into the very centre of his rebuke,
+with most singular effect, like a thought of the cold grave obtruding
+among wrathful passions.
+
+"Let go my garment, fellow! I tell you, I know not the man you speak
+of. What! I have authority, I have--hem, hem--authority; and if this be
+the respect you show for your betters, your feet shall be brought
+acquainted with the stocks by daylight, tomorrow morning!"
+
+Robin released the old man's skirt, and hastened away, pursued by an
+ill-mannered roar of laughter from the barber's shop. He was at first
+considerably surprised by the result of his question, but, being a
+shrewd youth, soon thought himself able to account for the mystery.
+
+"This is some country representative," was his conclusion, "who has
+never seen the inside of my kinsman's door, and lacks the breeding to
+answer a stranger civilly. The man is old, or verily--I might be
+tempted to turn back and smite him on the nose. Ah, Robin, Robin! even
+the barber's boys laugh at you for choosing such a guide! You will be
+wiser in time, friend Robin."
+
+He now became entangled in a succession of crooked and narrow streets,
+which crossed each other, and meandered at no great distance from the
+water-side. The smell of tar was obvious to his nostrils, the masts of
+vessels pierced the moonlight above the tops of the buildings, and the
+numerous signs, which Robin paused to read, informed him that he was
+near the centre of business. But the streets were empty, the shops were
+closed, and lights were visible only in the second stories of a few
+dwelling-houses. At length, on the corner of a narrow lane, through
+which he was passing, he beheld the broad countenance of a British hero
+swinging before the door of an inn, whence proceeded the voices of many
+guests. The casement of one of the lower windows was thrown back, and a
+very thin curtain permitted Robin to distinguish a party at supper,
+round a well-furnished table. The fragrance of the good cheer steamed
+forth into the outer air, and the youth could not fail to recollect
+that the last remnant of his travelling stock of provision had yielded
+to his morning appetite, and that noon had found and left him
+dinnerless.
+
+"Oh, that a parchment three-penny might give me a right to sit down at
+yonder table!" said Robin, with a sigh. "But the Major will make me
+welcome to the best of his victuals; so I will even step boldly in, and
+inquire my way to his dwelling."
+
+He entered the tavern, and was guided by the murmur of voices and the
+fumes of tobacco to the public-room. It was a long and low apartment,
+with oaken walls, grown dark in the continual smoke, and a floor which
+was thickly sanded, but of no immaculate purity. A number of
+persons--the larger part of whom appeared to be mariners, or in some
+way connected with the sea--occupied the wooden benches, or
+leatherbottomed chairs, conversing on various matters, and occasionally
+lending their attention to some topic of general interest. Three or
+four little groups were draining as many bowls of punch, which the West
+India trade had long since made a familiar drink in the colony. Others,
+who had the appearance of men who lived by regular and laborious
+handicraft, preferred the insulated bliss of an unshared potation, and
+became more taciturn under its influence. Nearly all, in short, evinced
+a predilection for the Good Creature in some of its various shapes, for
+this is a vice to which, as Fast Day sermons of a hundred years ago
+will testify, we have a long hereditary claim. The only guests to whom
+Robin's sympathies inclined him were two or three sheepish countrymen,
+who were using the inn somewhat after the fashion of a Turkish
+caravansary; they had gotten themselves into the darkest corner of the
+room, and heedless of the Nicotian atmosphere, were supping on the
+bread of their own ovens, and the bacon cured in their own
+chimney-smoke. But though Robin felt a sort of brotherhood with these
+strangers, his eyes were attracted from them to a person who stood near
+the door, holding whispered conversation with a group of ill-dressed
+associates. His features were separately striking almost to
+grotesqueness, and the whole face left a deep impression on the memory.
+The forehead bulged out into a double prominence, with a vale between;
+the nose came boldly forth in an irregular curve, and its bridge was of
+more than a finger's breadth; the eyebrows were deep and shaggy, and
+the eyes glowed beneath them like fire in a cave.
+
+While Robin deliberated of whom to inquire respecting his kinsman's
+dwelling, he was accosted by the innkeeper, a little man in a stained
+white apron, who had come to pay his professional welcome to the
+stranger. Being in the second generation from a French Protestant, he
+seemed to have inherited the courtesy of his parent nation; but no
+variety of circumstances was ever known to change his voice from the
+one shrill note in which he now addressed Robin.
+
+"From the country, I presume, sir?" said he, with a profound bow. "Beg
+leave to congratulate you on your arrival, and trust you intend a long
+stay with us. Fine town here, sir, beautiful buildings, and much that
+may interest a stranger. May I hope for the honor of your commands in
+respect to supper?"
+
+"The man sees a family likeness! the rogue has guessed that I am
+related to the Major!" thought Robin, who had hitherto experienced
+little superfluous civility.
+
+All eyes were now turned on the country lad, standing at the door, in
+his worn three-cornered hat, gray coat, leather breeches, and blue yarn
+stockings, leaning on an oaken cudgel, and bearing a wallet on his back.
+
+Robin replied to the courteous innkeeper, with such an assumption of
+confidence as befitted the Major's relative. "My honest friend," he
+said, "I shall make it a point to patronize your house on some
+occasion, when"--here he could not help lowering his voice--"when I may
+have more than a parchment three-pence in my pocket. My present
+business," continued he, speaking with lofty confidence, "is merely to
+inquire my way to the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux."
+
+There was a sudden and general movement in the room, which Robin
+interpreted as expressing the eagerness of each individual to become
+his guide. But the innkeeper turned his eyes to a written paper on the
+wall, which he read, or seemed to read, with occasional recurrences to
+the young man's figure.
+
+"What have we here?" said he, breaking his speech into little dry
+fragments. "'Left the house of the subscriber, bounden servant,
+Hezekiah Mudge,--had on, when he went away, gray coat, leather
+breeches, master's third-best hat. One pound currency reward to
+whosoever shall lodge him in any jail of the providence.' Better
+trudge, boy; better trudge!"
+
+Robin had begun to draw his hand towards the lighter end of the oak
+cudgel, but a strange hostility in every countenance induced him to
+relinquish his purpose of breaking the courteous innkeeper's head. As
+he turned to leave the room, he encountered a sneering glance from the
+bold-featured personage whom he had before noticed; and no sooner was
+he beyond the door, than he heard a general laugh, in which the
+innkeeper's voice might be distinguished, like the dropping of small
+stones into a kettle.
+
+"Now, is it not strange," thought Robin, with his usual shrewdness, "is
+it not strange that the confession of an empty pocket should outweigh
+the name of my kinsman, Major Molineux? Oh, if I had one of those
+grinning rascals in the woods, where I and my oak sapling grew up
+together, I would teach him that my arm is heavy though my purse be
+light!"
+
+On turning the corner of the narrow lane, Robin found himself in a
+spacious street, with an unbroken line of lofty houses on each side,
+and a steepled building at the upper end, whence the ringing of a bell
+announced the hour of nine. The light of the moon, and the lamps from
+the numerous shop-windows, discovered people promenading on the
+pavement, and amongst them Robin had hoped to recognize his hitherto
+inscrutable relative. The result of his former inquiries made him
+unwilling to hazard another, in a scene of such publicity, and he
+determined to walk slowly and silently up the street, thrusting his
+face close to that of every elderly gentleman, in search of the Major's
+lineaments. In his progress, Robin encountered many gay and gallant
+figures. Embroidered garments of showy colors, enormous periwigs,
+gold-laced hats, and silver-hilted swords glided past him and dazzled
+his optics. Travelled youths, imitators of the European fine gentlemen
+of the period, trod jauntily along, half dancing to the fashionable
+tunes which they hummed, and making poor Robin ashamed of his quiet and
+natural gait. At length, after many pauses to examine the gorgeous
+display of goods in the shop-windows, and after suffering some rebukes
+for the impertinence of his scrutiny into people's faces, the Major's
+kinsman found himself near the steepled building, still unsuccessful in
+his search. As yet, however, he had seen only one side of the thronged
+street; so Robin crossed, and continued the same sort of inquisition
+down the opposite pavement, with stronger hopes than the philosopher
+seeking an honest man, but with no better fortune. He had arrived about
+midway towards the lower end, from which his course began, when he
+overheard the approach of some one who struck down a cane on the
+flag-stones at every step, uttering at regular intervals, two
+sepulchral hems.
+
+"Mercy on us!" quoth Robin, recognizing the sound.
+
+Turning a corner, which chanced to be close at his right hand, he
+hastened to pursue his researches in some other part of the town. His
+patience now was wearing low, and he seemed to feel more fatigue from
+his rambles since he crossed the ferry, than from his journey of
+several days on the other side. Hunger also pleaded loudly within him,
+and Robin began to balance the propriety of demanding, violently, and
+with lifted cudgel, the necessary guidance from the first solitary
+passenger whom he should meet. While a resolution to this effect was
+gaining strength, he entered a street of mean appearance, on either
+side of which a row of ill-built houses was straggling towards the
+harbor. The moonlight fell upon no passenger along the whole extent,
+but in the third domicile which Robin passed there was a half-opened
+door, and his keen glance detected a woman's garment within.
+
+"My luck may be better here," said he to himself.
+
+Accordingly, he approached the doors and beheld it shut closer as he
+did so; yet an open space remained, sufficing for the fair occupant to
+observe the stranger, without a corresponding display on her part. All
+that Robin could discern was a strip of scarlet petticoat, and the
+occasional sparkle of an eye, as if the moonbeams were trembling on
+some bright thing.
+
+"Pretty mistress," for I may call her so with a good conscience thought
+the shrewd youth, since I know nothing to the contrary,--"my sweet
+pretty mistress, will you be kind enough to tell me whereabouts I must
+seek the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux?"
+
+Robin's voice was plaintive and winning, and the female, seeing nothing
+to be shunned in the handsome country youth, thrust open the door, and
+came forth into the moonlight. She was a dainty little figure with a
+white neck, round arms, and a slender waist, at the extremity of which
+her scarlet petticoat jutted out over a hoop, as if she were standing
+in a balloon. Moreover, her face was oval and pretty, her hair dark
+beneath the little cap, and her bright eyes possessed a sly freedom,
+which triumphed over those of Robin.
+
+"Major Molineux dwells here," said this fair woman.
+
+Now, her voice was the sweetest Robin had heard that night, yet he
+could not help doubting whether that sweet voice spoke Gospel truth. He
+looked up and down the mean street, and then surveyed the house before
+which they stood. It was a small, dark edifice of two stories, the
+second of which projected over the lower floor, and the front apartment
+had the aspect of a shop for petty commodities.
+
+"Now, truly, I am in luck," replied Robin, cunningly, "and so indeed is
+my kinsman, the Major, in having so pretty a housekeeper. But I prithee
+trouble him to step to the door; I will deliver him a message from his
+friends in the country, and then go back to my lodgings at the inn."
+
+"Nay, the Major has been abed this hour or more," said the lady of the
+scarlet petticoat; "and it would be to little purpose to disturb him
+to-night, seeing his evening draught was of the strongest. But he is a
+kind-hearted man, and it would be as much as my life's worth to let a
+kinsman of his turn away from the door. You are the good old
+gentleman's very picture, and I could swear that was his rainy-weather
+hat. Also he has garments very much resembling those leather
+small-clothes. But come in, I pray, for I bid you hearty welcome in his
+name."
+
+So saying, the fair and hospitable dame took our hero by the hand; and
+the touch was light, and the force was gentleness, and though Robin
+read in her eyes what he did not hear in her words, yet the
+slender-waisted woman in the scarlet petticoat proved stronger than the
+athletic country youth. She had drawn his half-willing footsteps nearly
+to the threshold, when the opening of a door in the neighborhood
+startled the Major's housekeeper, and, leaving the Major's kinsman, she
+vanished speedily into her own domicile. A heavy yawn preceded the
+appearance of a man, who, like the Moonshine of Pyramus and Thisbe,
+carried a lantern, needlessly aiding his sister luminary in the
+heavens. As he walked sleepily up the street, he turned his broad, dull
+face on Robin, and displayed a long staff, spiked at the end.
+
+"Home, vagabond, home!" said the watchman, in accents that seemed to
+fall asleep as soon as they were uttered. "Home, or we'll set you in
+the stocks by peep of day!"
+
+"This is the second hint of the kind," thought Robin. "I wish they
+would end my difficulties, by setting me there to-night."
+
+Nevertheless, the youth felt an instinctive antipathy towards the
+guardian of midnight order, which at first prevented him from asking
+his usual question. But just when the man was about to vanish behind
+the corner, Robin resolved not to lose the opportunity, and shouted
+lustily after him, "I say, friend! will you guide me to the house of my
+kinsman, Major Molineux?"
+
+The watchman made no reply, but turned the corner and was gone; yet
+Robin seemed to hear the sound of drowsy laughter stealing along the
+solitary street. At that moment, also, a pleasant titter saluted him
+from the open window above his head; he looked up, and caught the
+sparkle of a saucy eye; a round arm beckoned to him, and next he heard
+light footsteps descending the staircase within. But Robin, being of
+the household of a New England clergyman, was a good youth, as well as
+a shrewd one; so he resisted temptation, and fled away.
+
+He now roamed desperately, and at random, through the town, almost
+ready to believe that a spell was on him, like that by which a wizard
+of his country had once kept three pursuers wandering, a whole winter
+night, within twenty paces of the cottage which they sought. The
+streets lay before him, strange and desolate, and the lights were
+extinguished in almost every house. Twice, however, little parties of
+men, among whom Robin distinguished individuals in outlandish attire,
+came hurrying along; but, though on both occasions, they paused to
+address him such intercourse did not at all enlighten his perplexity.
+They did but utter a few words in some language of which Robin knew
+nothing, and perceiving his inability to answer, bestowed a curse upon
+him in plain English and hastened away. Finally, the lad determined to
+knock at the door of every mansion that might appear worthy to be
+occupied by his kinsman, trusting that perseverance would overcome the
+fatality that had hitherto thwarted him. Firm in this resolve, he was
+passing beneath the walls of a church, which formed the corner of two
+streets, when, as he turned into the shade of its steeple, he
+encountered a bulky stranger muffled in a cloak. The man was proceeding
+with the speed of earnest business, but Robin planted himself full
+before him, holding the oak cudgel with both hands across his body as a
+bar to further passage.
+
+"Halt, honest man, and answer me a question," said he, very resolutely.
+"Tell me, this instant, whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman,
+Major Molineux!"
+
+"Keep your tongue between your teeth, fool, and let me pass!" said a
+deep, gruff voice, which Robin partly remembered. "Let me pass, or I'll
+strike you to the earth!"
+
+"No, no, neighbor!" cried Robin, flourishing his cudgel, and then
+thrusting its larger end close to the man's muffled face. "No, no, I'm
+not the fool you take me for, nor do you pass till I have an answer to
+my question. Whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major
+Molineux?" The stranger, instead of attempting to force his passage,
+stepped back into the moonlight, unmuffled his face, and stared full
+into that of Robin.
+
+"Watch here an hour, and Major Molineux will pass by," said he.
+
+Robin gazed with dismay and astonishment on the unprecedented
+physiognomy of the speaker. The forehead with its double prominence the
+broad hooked nose, the shaggy eyebrows, and fiery eyes were those which
+he had noticed at the inn, but the man's complexion had undergone a
+singular, or, more properly, a twofold change. One side of the face
+blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight, the
+division line being in the broad bridge of the nose; and a mouth which
+seemed to extend from ear to ear was black or red, in contrast to the
+color of the cheek. The effect was as if two individual devils, a fiend
+of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this
+infernal visage. The stranger grinned in Robin's face, muffled his
+party-colored features, and was out of sight in a moment.
+
+"Strange things we travellers see!" ejaculated Robin.
+
+He seated himself, however, upon the steps of the church-door,
+resolving to wait the appointed time for his kinsman. A few moments
+were consumed in philosophical speculations upon the species of man who
+had just left him; but having settled this point shrewdly, rationally,
+and satisfactorily, he was compelled to look elsewhere for his
+amusement. And first he threw his eyes along the street. It was of more
+respectable appearance than most of those into which he had wandered,
+and the moon, creating, like the imaginative power, a beautiful
+strangeness in familiar objects, gave something of romance to a scene
+that might not have possessed it in the light of day. The irregular and
+often quaint architecture of the houses, some of whose roofs were
+broken into numerous little peaks, while others ascended, steep and
+narrow, into a single point, and others again were square; the pure
+snow-white of some of their complexions, the aged darkness of others,
+and the thousand sparklings, reflected from bright substances in the
+walls of many; these matters engaged Robin's attention for a while, and
+then began to grow wearisome. Next he endeavored to define the forms of
+distant objects, starting away, with almost ghostly indistinctness,
+just as his eye appeared to grasp them, and finally he took a minute
+survey of an edifice which stood on the opposite side of the street,
+directly in front of the church-door, where he was stationed. It was a
+large, square mansion, distinguished from its neighbors by a balcony,
+which rested on tall pillars, and by an elaborate Gothic window,
+communicating therewith.
+
+"Perhaps this is the very house I have been seeking," thought Robin.
+
+Then he strove to speed away the time, by listening to a murmur which
+swept continually along the street, yet was scarcely audible, except to
+an unaccustomed ear like his; it was a low, dull, dreamy sound,
+compounded of many noises, each of which was at too great a distance to
+be separately heard. Robin marvelled at this snore of a sleeping town,
+and marvelled more whenever its continuity was broken by now and then a
+distant shout, apparently loud where it originated. But altogether it
+was a sleep-inspiring sound, and, to shake off its drowsy influence,
+Robin arose, and climbed a window-frame, that he might view the
+interior of the church. There the moonbeams came trembling in, and fell
+down upon the deserted pews, and extended along the quiet aisles. A
+fainter yet more awful radiance was hovering around the pulpit, and one
+solitary ray had dared to rest upon the open page of the great Bible.
+Had nature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the house which
+man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the visible sanctity of the
+place,--visible because no earthly and impure feet were within the
+walls? The scene made Robin's heart shiver with a sensation of
+loneliness stronger than he had ever felt in the remotest depths of his
+native woods; so he turned away and sat down again before the door.
+There were graves around the church, and now an uneasy thought obtruded
+into Robin's breast. What if the object of his search, which had been
+so often and so strangely thwarted, were all the time mouldering in his
+shroud? What if his kinsman should glide through yonder gate, and nod
+and smile to him in dimly passing by?
+
+"Oh that any breathing thing were here with me!" said Robin.
+
+Recalling his thoughts from this uncomfortable track, he sent them over
+forest, hill, and stream, and attempted to imagine how that evening of
+ambiguity and weariness had been spent by his father's household. He
+pictured them assembled at the door, beneath the tree, the great old
+tree, which had been spared for its huge twisted trunk and venerable
+shade, when a thousand leafy brethren fell. There, at the going down of
+the summer sun, it was his father's custom to perform domestic worship
+that the neighbors might come and join with him like brothers of the
+family, and that the wayfaring man might pause to drink at that
+fountain, and keep his heart pure by freshening the memory of home.
+Robin distinguished the seat of every individual of the little
+audience; he saw the good man in the midst, holding the Scriptures in
+the golden light that fell from the western clouds; he beheld him close
+the book and all rise up to pray. He heard the old thanksgivings for
+daily mercies, the old supplications for their continuance to which he
+had so often listened in weariness, but which were now among his dear
+remembrances. He perceived the slight inequality of his father's voice
+when he came to speak of the absent one; he noted how his mother turned
+her face to the broad and knotted trunk; how his elder brother scorned,
+because the beard was rough upon his upper lip, to permit his features
+to be moved; how the younger sister drew down a low hanging branch
+before her eyes; and how the little one of all, whose sports had
+hitherto broken the decorum of the scene, understood the prayer for her
+playmate, and burst into clamorous grief. Then he saw them go in at the
+door; and when Robin would have entered also, the latch tinkled into
+its place, and he was excluded from his home.
+
+"Am I here, or there?" cried Robin, starting; for all at once, when his
+thoughts had become visible and audible in a dream, the long, wide,
+solitary street shone out before him.
+
+He aroused himself, and endeavored to fix his attention steadily upon
+the large edifice which he had surveyed before. But still his mind kept
+vibrating between fancy and reality; by turns, the pillars of the
+balcony lengthened into the tall, bare stems of pines, dwindled down to
+human figures, settled again into their true shape and size, and then
+commenced a new succession of changes. For a single moment, when he
+deemed himself awake, he could have sworn that a visage--one which he
+seemed to remember, yet could not absolutely name as his kinsman's--was
+looking towards him from the Gothic window. A deeper sleep wrestled
+with and nearly overcame him, but fled at the sound of footsteps along
+the opposite pavement. Robin rubbed his eyes, discerned a man passing
+at the foot of the balcony, and addressed him in a loud, peevish, and
+lamentable cry.
+
+"Hallo, friend! must I wait here all night for my kinsman, Major
+Molineux?"
+
+The sleeping echoes awoke, and answered the voice; and the passenger,
+barely able to discern a figure sitting in the oblique shade of the
+steeple, traversed the street to obtain a nearer view. He was himself a
+gentleman in his prime, of open, intelligent, cheerful, and altogether
+prepossessing countenance. Perceiving a country youth, apparently
+homeless and without friends, he accosted him in a tone of real
+kindness, which had become strange to Robin's ears.
+
+"Well, my good lad, why are you sitting here?" inquired he. "Can I be
+of service to you in any way?"
+
+"I am afraid not, sir," replied Robin, despondingly; "yet I shall take
+it kindly, if you'll answer me a single question. I've been searching,
+half the night, for one Major Molineux, now, sir, is there really such
+a person in these parts, or am I dreaming?"
+
+"Major Molineux! The name is not altogether strange to me," said the
+gentleman, smiling. "Have you any objection to telling me the nature of
+your business with him?"
+
+Then Robin briefly related that his father was a clergyman, settled on
+a small salary, at a long distance back in the country, and that he and
+Major Molineux were brothers' children. The Major, having inherited
+riches, and acquired civil and military rank, had visited his cousin,
+in great pomp, a year or two before; had manifested much interest in
+Robin and an elder brother, and, being childless himself, had thrown
+out hints respecting the future establishment of one of them in life.
+The elder brother was destined to succeed to the farm which his father
+cultivated in the interval of sacred duties; it was therefore
+determined that Robin should profit by his kinsman's generous
+intentions, especially as he seemed to be rather the favorite, and was
+thought to possess other necessary endowments.
+
+"For I have the name of being a shrewd youth," observed Robin, in this
+part of his story.
+
+"I doubt not you deserve it," replied his new friend, good-naturedly;
+"but pray proceed."
+
+"Well, sir, being nearly eighteen years old, and well grown, as you
+see," continued Robin, drawing himself up to his full height, "I
+thought it high time to begin in the world. So my mother and sister put
+me in handsome trim, and my father gave me half the remnant of his last
+year's salary, and five days ago I started for this place, to pay the
+Major a visit. But, would you believe it, sir! I crossed the ferry a
+little after dark, and have yet found nobody that would show me the way
+to his dwelling; only, an hour or two since, I was told to wait here,
+and Major Molineux would pass by."
+
+"Can you describe the man who told you this?" inquired the gentleman.
+
+"Oh, he was a very ill-favored fellow, sir," replied Robin, "with two
+great bumps on his forehead, a hook nose, fiery eyes; and, what struck
+me as the strangest, his face was of two different colors. Do you
+happen to know such a man, sir?"
+
+"Not intimately," answered the stranger, "but I chanced to meet him a
+little time previous to your stopping me. I believe you may trust his
+word, and that the Major will very shortly pass through this street. In
+the mean time, as I have a singular curiosity to witness your meeting,
+I will sit down here upon the steps and bear you company."
+
+He seated himself accordingly, and soon engaged his companion in
+animated discourse. It was but of brief continuance, however, for a
+noise of shouting, which had long been remotely audible, drew so much
+nearer that Robin inquired its cause.
+
+"What may be the meaning of this uproar?" asked he. "Truly, if your
+town be always as noisy, I shall find little sleep while I am an
+inhabitant."
+
+"Why, indeed, friend Robin, there do appear to be three or four riotous
+fellows abroad to-night," replied the gentleman. "You must not expect
+all the stillness of your native woods here in our streets. But the
+watch will shortly be at the heels of these lads and--"
+
+"Ay, and set them in the stocks by peep of day," interrupted Robin
+recollecting his own encounter with the drowsy lantern-bearer. "But,
+dear sir, if I may trust my ears, an army of watchmen would never make
+head against such a multitude of rioters. There were at least a
+thousand voices went up to make that one shout."
+
+"May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions?"
+said his friend.
+
+"Perhaps a man may; but Heaven forbid that a woman should!" responded
+the shrewd youth, thinking of the seductive tones of the Major's
+housekeeper.
+
+The sounds of a trumpet in some neighboring street now became so
+evident and continual, that Robin's curiosity was strongly excited. In
+addition to the shouts, he heard frequent bursts from many instruments
+of discord, and a wild and confused laughter filled up the intervals.
+Robin rose from the steps, and looked wistfully towards a point whither
+people seemed to be hastening.
+
+"Surely some prodigious merry-making is going on," exclaimed he "I have
+laughed very little since I left home, sir, and should be sorry to lose
+an opportunity. Shall we step round the corner by that darkish house
+and take our share of the fun?"
+
+"Sit down again, sit down, good Robin," replied the gentleman, laying
+his hand on the skirt of the gray coat. "You forget that we must wait
+here for your kinsman; and there is reason to believe that he will pass
+by, in the course of a very few moments."
+
+The near approach of the uproar had now disturbed the neighborhood;
+windows flew open on all sides; and many heads, in the attire of the
+pillow, and confused by sleep suddenly broken, were protruded to the
+gaze of whoever had leisure to observe them. Eager voices hailed each
+other from house to house, all demanding the explanation, which not a
+soul could give. Half-dressed men hurried towards the unknown commotion
+stumbling as they went over the stone steps that thrust themselves into
+the narrow foot-walk. The shouts, the laughter, and the tuneless bray
+the antipodes of music, came onwards with increasing din, till
+scattered individuals, and then denser bodies, began to appear round a
+corner at the distance of a hundred yards.
+
+"Will you recognize your kinsman, if he passes in this crowd?" inquired
+the gentleman.
+
+"Indeed, I can't warrant it, sir; but I'll take my stand here, and keep
+a bright lookout," answered Robin, descending to the outer edge of the
+pavement.
+
+A mighty stream of people now emptied into the street, and came rolling
+slowly towards the church. A single horseman wheeled the corner in the
+midst of them, and close behind him came a band of fearful wind
+instruments, sending forth a fresher discord now that no intervening
+buildings kept it from the ear. Then a redder light disturbed the
+moonbeams, and a dense multitude of torches shone along the street,
+concealing, by their glare, whatever object they illuminated. The
+single horseman, clad in a military dress, and bearing a drawn sword,
+rode onward as the leader, and, by his fierce and variegated
+countenance, appeared like war personified; the red of one cheek was an
+emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the
+mourning that attends them. In his train were wild figures in the
+Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the
+whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some
+feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets.
+A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the
+procession in; and several women ran along the sidewalk, piercing the
+confusion of heavier sounds with their shrill voices of mirth or terror.
+
+"The double-faced fellow has his eye upon me," muttered Robin, with an
+indefinite but an uncomfortable idea that he was himself to bear a part
+in the pageantry.
+
+The leader turned himself in the saddle, and fixed his glance full upon
+the country youth, as the steed went slowly by. When Robin had freed
+his eyes from those fiery ones, the musicians were passing before him,
+and the torches were close at hand; but the unsteady brightness of the
+latter formed a veil which he could not penetrate. The rattling of
+wheels over the stones sometimes found its way to his ear, and confused
+traces of a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted into the
+vivid light. A moment more, and the leader thundered a command to halt:
+the trumpets vomited a horrid breath, and then held their peace; the
+shouts and laughter of the people died away, and there remained only a
+universal hum, allied to silence. Right before Robin's eyes was an
+uncovered cart. There the torches blazed the brightest, there the moon
+shone out like day, and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sat his
+kinsman, Major Molineux!
+
+He was an elderly man, of large and majestic person, and strong, square
+features, betokening a steady soul; but steady as it was, his enemies
+had found means to shake it. His face was pale as death, and far more
+ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his
+eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the
+foam hung white upon his quivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by
+a quick and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in
+those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation. But perhaps the
+bitterest pang of all was when his eyes met those of Robin; for he
+evidently knew him on the instant, as the youth stood witnessing the
+foul disgrace of a head grown gray in honor. They stared at each other
+in silence, and Robin's knees shook, and his hair bristled, with a
+mixture of pity and terror. Soon, however, a bewildering excitement
+began to seize upon his mind; the preceding adventures of the night,
+the unexpected appearance of the crowd, the torches, the confused din
+and the hush that followed, the spectre of his kinsman reviled by that
+great multitude,--all this, and, more than all, a perception of
+tremendous ridicule in the whole scene, affected him with a sort of
+mental inebriety. At that moment a voice of sluggish merriment saluted
+Robin's ears; he turned instinctively, and just behind the corner of
+the church stood the lantern-bearer, rubbing his eyes, and drowsily
+enjoying the lad's amazement. Then he heard a peal of laughter like the
+ringing of silvery bells; a woman twitched his arm, a saucy eye met
+his, and he saw the lady of the scarlet petticoat. A sharp, dry
+cachinnation appealed to his memory, and, standing on tiptoe in the
+crowd, with his white apron over his head, he beheld the courteous
+little innkeeper. And lastly, there sailed over the heads of the
+multitude a great, broad laugh, broken in the midst by two sepulchral
+hems; thus, "Haw, haw, haw,--hem, hem,--haw, haw, haw, haw!"
+
+The sound proceeded from the balcony of the opposite edifice, and
+thither Robin turned his eyes. In front of the Gothic window stood the
+old citizen, wrapped in a wide gown, his gray periwig exchanged for a
+nightcap, which was thrust back from his forehead, and his silk
+stockings hanging about his legs. He supported himself on his polished
+cane in a fit of convulsive merriment, which manifested itself on his
+solemn old features like a funny inscription on a tombstone. Then Robin
+seemed to hear the voices of the barbers, of the guests of the inn, and
+of all who had made sport of him that night. The contagion was
+spreading among the multitude, when all at once, it seized upon Robin,
+and he sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the
+street,--every man shook his sides, every man emptied his lungs, but
+Robin's shout was the loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from
+their silvery islands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the
+sky! The Man in the Moon heard the far bellow. "Oho," quoth he, "the
+old earth is frolicsome to-night!"
+
+When there was a momentary calm in that tempestuous sea of sound, the
+leader gave the sign, the procession resumed its march. On they went,
+like fiends that throng in mockery around some dead potentate, mighty
+no more, but majestic still in his agony. On they went, in
+counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment,
+trampling all on an old man's heart. On swept the tumult, and left a
+silent street behind.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Well, Robin, are you dreaming?" inquired the gentleman, laying his
+hand on the youth's shoulder.
+
+Robin started, and withdrew his arm from the stone post to which he had
+instinctively clung, as the living stream rolled by him. His cheek was
+somewhat pale, and his eye not quite as lively as in the earlier part
+of the evening.
+
+"Will you be kind enough to show me the way to the ferry?" said he,
+after a moment's pause.
+
+"You have, then, adopted a new subject of inquiry?" observed his
+companion, with a smile.
+
+"Why, yes, sir," replied Robin, rather dryly. "Thanks to you, and to my
+other friends, I have at last met my kinsman, and he will scarce desire
+to see my face again. I begin to grow weary of a town life, sir. Will
+you show me the way to the ferry?"
+
+"No, my good friend Robin,--not to-night, at least," said the
+gentleman. "Some few days hence, if you wish it, I will speed you on
+your journey. Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are
+a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world without the help of your
+kinsman, Major Molineux."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Snow Image, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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