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

The showman proceeds.

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

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

him. An Indian, half hidden in the dusky shade, is
gazing and wondering too.

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

But see! Roger Conant has other neighbors within
view. Peter Palfrey likewise has built himself a house,
and so has Balch, and Norman, and Woodbury. Their
dwellings, indeed, — such is the ingenious contrivance
of this piece of pictorial mechanism, — seem to have
arisen, at various points of the scene, even while we
have been looking at it. The forest-track, trodden more
and more by the hob-nailed shoes of these sturdy and

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinctness which it
never could have acquired from the light tread of a hundred
times as many Indian moccasins. It will be a
street, anon. As we observe it now, it goes onward
from one clearing to another, here plunging into a
shadowy strip of woods, there open to the sunshine, but
everywhere showing a decided line, along which human
interests have begun to hold their career. Over yonder
swampy spot, two trees have been felled, and laid side
by side, to make a causeway. In another place, the axe
has cleared away a confused intricacy of fallen trees and
clustered boughs, which had been tossed together by a
hurricane. So now the little children, just beginning
to run alone, may trip along the path, and not often
stumble over an impediment, unless they stray from it
to gather wood-berries beneath the trees. And, besides
the feet of grown people and children, there are the
cloven hoofs of a small herd of cows, who seek their
subsistence from the native grasses, and help to deepen
the track of the future thoroughfare. Goats also browse
along it, and nibble at the twigs that thrust themselves
across the way. Not seldom, in its more secluded portions,
where the black shadow of the forest strives to
hide the trace of human footsteps, stalks a gaunt wolf,
on the watch for a kid or a young calf; or fixes his
hungry gaze on the group of children gathering berries,
and can hardly forbear to rush upon them. And the
Indians, coming from their distant wigwams to view the
white man's settlement, marvel at the deep track which
he makes, and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment
that this heavy tread will find its way over
all the land; and that the wild woods, the wild wolf,

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

and the wild Indian, will alike be trampled beneath it.
Even so shall it be. The pavements of the Main-street
must be laid over the red man's grave.

Behold! here is a spectacle which should be ushered
in by the peal of trumpets, if Naumkeag had ever yet
heard that cheery music, and by the roar of cannon,
echoing among the woods. A procession, — for, by its
dignity, as marking an epoch in the history of the street,
it deserves that name, — a procession advances along
the pathway. The good ship Abigail has arrived from
England, bringing wares and merchandise, for the comfort
of the inhabitants, and traffic with the Indians;
bringing passengers too, and, more important than all, a
governor for the new settlement. Roger Conant and
Peter Palfrey, with their companions, have been to the
shore to welcome him; and now, with such honor and
triumph as their rude way of life permits, are escorting
the sea-flushed voyagers to their habitations. At the
point where Endicott enters upon the scene, two venerable
trees unite their branches high above his head;
thus forming a triumphal arch of living verdure, beneath
which he pauses, with his wife leaning on his arm, to
catch the first impression of their new-found home. The
old settlers gaze not less earnestly at him, than he at the
hoary woods and the rough surface of the clearings.
They like his bearded face, under the shadow of the
broad-brimmed and steeple-crowned Puritan hat; — a
visage resolute, grave, and thoughtful, yet apt to kindle
with that glow of a cheerful spirit by which men of
strong character are enabled to go joyfully on their
proper tasks. His form, too, as you see it, in a doublet
and hose of sad-colored cloth, is of a manly make, fit for

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

toil and hardship, and fit to wield the heavy sword that
hangs from his leathern belt. His aspect is a better
warrant for the ruler's office than the parchment commission
which he bears, however fortified it may be with
the broad seal of the London council. Peter Palfrey
nods to Roger Conant. “The worshipful Court of
Assistants have done wisely,” say they between themselves.
“They have chosen for our governor a man
out of a thousand.” Then they toss up their hats, —
they, and all the uncouth figures of their company, most
of whom are clad in skins, inasmuch as their old kersey
and linsey-woolsey garments have been torn and tattered
by many a long month's wear, — they all toss up their
hats, and salute their new governor and captain with a
hearty English shout of welcome. We seem to hear it
with our own ears, so perfectly is the action represented
in this life-like, this almost magic picture!

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

“This is too ridiculous! — positively insufferable!”

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

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

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

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

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

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

During this little interruption, you perceive that the
Anglo-Saxon energy — as the phrase now goes — has
been at work in the spectacle before us. So many
chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to
have the aspect of a village street; although everything
is so inartificial and inceptive, that it seems as if one
returning wave of the wild nature might overwhelm it
all. But the one edifice which gives the pledge of

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

permanence to this bold enterprise is seen at the central point
of the picture. There stands the meeting-house, a
small structure, low-roofed, without a spire, and built of
rough timber, newly hewn, with the sap still in the
logs, and here and there a strip of bark adhering to
them. A meaner temple was never consecrated to the
worship of the Deity. With the alternative of kneeling
beneath the awful vault of the firmament, it is strange
that men should creep into this pent-up nook, and expect
God's presence there. Such, at least, one would
imagine, might be the feeling of these forest-settlers,
accustomed, as they had been, to stand under the dim
arches of vast cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary
worship in the old, ivy-covered churches of rural
England, around which lay the bones of many generations
of their forefathers. How could they dispense
with the carved altar-work? — how, with the pictured
windows, where the light of common day was hallowed
by being transmitted through the glorified figures of
saints? — how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it must
have been, with the prayers that had gone upward for
centuries? — how, with the rich peal of the solemn
organ, rolling along the aisles, pervading the whole
church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of
audible religion? They needed nothing of all this.
Their house of worship, like their ceremonial, was
naked, simple, and severe. But the zeal of a recovered
faith burned like a lamp within their hearts, enriching
everything around them with its radiance; making of
these new walls, and this narrow compass, its own cathedral;
and being, in itself, that spiritual mystery and
experience, of which sacred architecture, pictured

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

windows, and the organ's grand solemnity, are remote and
imperfect symbols. All was well, so long as their lamps
were freshly kindled at the heavenly flame. After a
while, however, whether in their time or their children's,
these lamps began to burn more dimly, or with a less
genuine lustre; and then it might be seen how hard,
cold and confined, was their system, — how like an iron
cage was that which they called Liberty.

Too much of this. Look again at the picture, and
observe how the aforesaid Anglo-Saxon energy is now
trampling along the street, and raising a positive cloud
of dust beneath its sturdy footsteps. For there the
carpenters are building a new house, the frame of which
was hewn and fitted in England, of English oak, and
sent hither on shipboard; and here a blacksmith makes
huge clang and clatter on his anvil, shaping out tools and
weapons; and yonder a wheelwright, who boasts himself
a London workman, regularly bred to his handicraft,
is fashioning a set of wagon-wheels, the track of
which shall soon be visible. The wild forest is shrinking
back; the street has lost the aromatic odor of the
pine-trees, and of the sweet fern that grew beneath them.
The tender and modest wild-flowers, those gentle children
of savage nature that grew pale beneath the ever-brooding
shade, have shrunk away and disappeared, like stars
that vanish in the breadth of light. Gardens are fenced
in, and display pumpkin-beds and rows of cabbages and
beans; and, though the governor and the minister both
view them with a disapproving eye, plants of broadleaved
tobacco, which the cultivators are enjoined to use
privily, or not at all. No wolf, for a year past, has
been heard to bark, or known to range among the

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

dwellings, except that single one, whose grisly head, with a
plash of blood beneath it, is now affixed to the portal of
the meeting-house. The partridge has ceased to run
across the too-frequented path. Of all the wild life that
used to throng here, only the Indians still come into the
settlement, bringing the skins of beaver and otter, bear
and elk, which they sell to Endicott for the wares of
England. And there is little John Massey, the son of
Jeffrey Massey and first-born of Naumkeag, playing beside
his father's threshold, a child of six or seven years old.
Which is the better-grown infant, — the town or the boy?

The red men have become aware that the street is no
longer free to them, save by the sufferance and permission
of the settlers. Often, to impress them with an
awe of English power, there is a muster and training
of the town-forces, and a stately march of the mail-clad
band, like this which we now see advancing up the
street. There they come, fifty of them, or more; all
with their iron breastplates and steel caps well burnished,
and glimmering bravely against the sun; their ponderous
muskets on their shoulders, their bandaliers about
their waists, their lighted matches in their hands, and
the drum and fife playing cheerily before them. See!
do they not step like martial men? Do they not
manœuvre like soldiers who have seen stricken fields?
And well they may; for this band is composed of precisely
such materials as those with which Cromwell is
preparing to beat down the strength of a kingdom; and
his famous regiment of Ironsides might be recruited from
just such men. In everything, at this period, New England
was the essential spirit and flower of that which
was about to become uppermost in the mother-country.

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

Many a bold and wise man lost the fame which would
have accrued to him in English history, by crossing the
Atlantic with our forefathers. Many a valiant captain,
who might have been foremost at Marston Moor or
Naseby, exhausted his martial ardor in the command of
a log-built fortress, like that which you observe on the
gently rising ground at the right of the pathway, — its
banner fluttering in the breeze, and the culverins and
sakers showing their deadly muzzles over the rampart.

A multitude of people were now thronging to New
England: some, because the ancient and ponderous
frame-work of Church and State threatened to crumble
down upon their heads; others, because they despaired
of such a downfall. Among those who came to Naumkeag
were men of history and legend, whose feet leave
a track of brightness along any pathway which they
have trodden. You shall behold their life-like images,—
their spectres, if you choose so to call them, — passing,
encountering with a familiar nod, stopping to converse
together, praying, bearing weapons, laboring or
resting from their labors, in the Main-street. Here,
now, comes Hugh Peters, an earnest, restless man,
walking swiftly, as being impelled by that fiery activity of
nature which shall hereafter thrust him into the conflict
of dangerous affairs, make him the chaplain and counsellor
of Cromwell, and finally bring him to a bloody
end. He pauses, by the meeting-house, to exchange a
greeting with Roger Williams, whose face indicates,
methinks, a gentler spirit, kinder and more expansive,
than that of Peters; yet not less active for what he discerns
to be the will of God, or the welfare of mankind.
And look! here is a guest for Endicott, coming forth out

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

of the forest, through which he has been journeying from
Boston, and which, with its rude branches, has caught
hold of his attire, and has wet his feet with its swamps
and streams. Still there is something in his mild and
venerable, though not aged presence, — a propriety, an
equilibrium, in Governor Winthrop's nature, — that causes
the disarray of his costume to be unnoticed, and gives
us the same impression as if he were clad in such grave
and rich attire as we may suppose him to have worn in
the Council-chamber of the colony. Is not this characteristic
wonderfully perceptible in our spectral representative
of his person? But what dignitary is this
crossing from the other side to greet the governor? A
stately personage, in a dark velvet cloak, with a hoary
beard, and a gold chain across his breast; he has the
authoritative port of one who has filled the highest civic
station in the first of cities. Of all men in the world,
we should least expect to meet the Lord Mayor of London—
as Sir Richard Saltonstall has been, once and
again — in a forest-bordered settlement of the western
wilderness.

Further down the street, we see Emanuel Downing, a
grave and worthy citizen, with his son George, a stripling
who has a career before him; his shrewd and quick
capacity and pliant conscience shall not only exalt him
high, but secure him from a downfall. Here is another
figure, on whose characteristic make and expressive
action I will stake the credit of my pictorial puppet-show.
Have you not already detected a quaint, sly
humor in that face, — an eccentricity in the manner, —
a certain indescribable waywardness, — all the marks, in
short, of an original man, unmistakably impressed, yet

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

kept down by a sense of clerical restraint? That is
Nathaniel Ward, the minister of Ipswich, but better
remembered as the simple cobbler of Agawam. He
hammered his sole so faithfully, and stitched his upper-leather
so well, that the shoe is hardly yet worn out,
though thrown aside for some two centuries past. And
next, among these Puritans and Roundheads, we observe
the very model of a Cavalier, with the curling lovelock,
the fantastically trimmed beard, the embroidery, the
ornamented rapier, the gilded dagger, and all other
foppishnesses that distinguished the wild gallants who
rode headlong to their overthrow in the cause of King
Charles. This is Morton of Merry Mount, who has
come hither to hold a council with Endicott, but will
shortly be his prisoner. Yonder pale, decaying figure
of a white-robed woman, who glides slowly along the
street, is the Lady Arabella, looking for her own grave
in the virgin soil. That other female form, who seems
to be talking — we might almost say preaching or
expounding — in the centre of a group of profoundly
attentive auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here comes
Vane. —

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

“The fellow,” adds the scarcely civil critic, “has
learned a bead-roll of historic names, whom he lugs into

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

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

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

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

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

“I know better,” retorts the critic, settling himself in
his seat, with sullen but self-complacent immovableness.

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

“And, as for my own pleasure, I shall best consult it by
remaining precisely where I am.”

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

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

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

through a length of time which would have tried the
stability of brick and stone; so that, in all the progressive
decay and continual reconstruction of the street,
down to our own days, we shall still behold these old
edifices occupying their long-accustomed sites. For
instance, on the upper corner of that green lane which
shall hereafter be North-street, we see the Curwen
House, newly built, with the carpenters still at work on
the roof, nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. On
the lower corner stands another dwelling, — destined, at
some period of its existence, to be the abode of an
unsuccessful alchemist, — which shall likewise survive
to our own generation, and perhaps long outlive it.
Thus, through the medium of these patriarchal edifices,
we have now established a sort of kindred and hereditary
acquaintance with the Main-street.

Great as is the transformation produced by a short
term of years, each single day creeps through the Puritan
settlement sluggishly enough. It shall pass before
your eyes, condensed into the space of a few moments.
The gray light of early morning is slowly diffusing
itself over the scene; and the bellman, whose office it is
to cry the hour at the street-corners, rings the last peal
upon his hand-bell, and goes wearily homewards, with the
owls, the bats, and other creatures of the night. Lattices
are thrust back on their hinges, as if the town were
opening its eyes, in the summer morning. Forth stumbles
the still drowsy cow-herd, with his horn; putting
which to his lips, it emits a bellowing bray, impossible to
be represented in the picture, but which reaches the
pricked-up ears of every cow in the settlement, and tells
her that the dewy pasture-hour is come. House after

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

house awakes, and sends the smoke up curling from its
chimney, like frosty breath from living nostrils; and as
those white wreaths of smoke, though impregnated with
earthy admixtures, climb skyward, so, from each dwelling,
does the morning worship — its spiritual essence
bearing up its human imperfection — find its way to the
heavenly Father's throne.

The breakfast-hour being passed, the inhabitants do
not, as usual, go to their fields or workshops, but remain
within doors; or perhaps walk the street, with a grave
sobriety, yet a disengaged and unburthened aspect, that
belongs neither to a holiday nor a Sabbath. And,
indeed, this passing day is neither, nor is it a common
week-day, although partaking of all the three. It is the
Thursday Lecture; an institution which New England
has long ago relinquished, and almost forgotten, yet
which it would have been better to retain, as bearing
relations to both the spiritual and ordinary life, and
bringing each acquainted with the other. The tokens
of its observance, however, which here meet our eyes,
are of rather a questionable cast. It is, in one sense, a
day of public shame; the day on which transgressors,
who have made themselves liable to the minor severities
of the Puritan law, receive their reward of ignominy.
At this very moment, the constable has bound an idle
fellow to the whipping-post, and is giving him his
deserts with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Ever since sunrise,
Daniel Fairfield has been standing on the steps of the
meeting-house, with a halter about his neck, which he is
condemned to wear visibly throughout his lifetime;
Dorothy Talby is chained to a post at the corner of
Prison-lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand
against her husband; while, through the bars of that
great wooden cage, in the centre of the scene, we discern
either a human being or a wild beast, or both in one,
whom this public infamy causes to roar, and gnash his
teeth, and shake the strong oaken bars, as if he would
break forth, and tear in pieces the little children who
have been peeping at him. Such are the profitable
sights that serve the good people to while away the
earlier part of lecture-day. Betimes in the forenoon, a
traveller — the first traveller that has come hitherward
this morning — rides slowly into the street, on his patient
steed. He seems a clergyman; and, as he draws near,
we recognize the minister of Lynn, who was preengaged
to lecture here, and has been revolving his
discourse, as he rode through the hoary wilderness.
Behold, now, the whole town thronging into the meeting-house,
mostly with such sombre visages that the
sunshine becomes little better than a shadow when it
falls upon them. There go the Thirteen Men, grim
rulers of a grim community! There goes John Massey,
the first town-born child, now a youth of twenty, whose
eye wanders with peculiar interest towards that buxom
damsel who comes up the steps at the same instant.
There hobbles Goody Foster, a sour and bitter old
beldam, looking as if she went to curse, and not to pray,
and whom many of her neighbors suspect of taking an
occasional airing on a broomstick. There, too, slinking
shamefacedly in, you observe that same poor do-nothing
and good-for-nothing whom we saw castigated just now
at the whipping-post. Last of all, there goes the tithing-man,
lugging in a couple of small boys, whom he has

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

caught at play beneath God's blessed sunshine, in a back
lane. What native of Naumkeag, whose recollections
go back more than thirty years, does not still shudder at
that dark ogre of his infancy, who perhaps had long
ceased to have an actual existence, but still lived in his
childish belief, in a horrible idea, and in the nurse's
threat, as the Tidy Man!

It will be hardly worth our while to wait two, or it
may be three, turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion
of the lecture. Therefore, by my control over light
and darkness, I cause the dusk, and then the starless
night, to brood over the street; and summon forth again
the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his
footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, and
shout drowsily the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears.
Happy are we, if for nothing else, yet because we did
not live in those days. In truth, when the first novelty
and stir of spirit had subsided, — when the new settlement,
between the forest-border and the sea, had become
actually a little town, — its daily life must have trudged
onward with hardly anything to diversify and enliven
it, while also its rigidity could not fail to cause miserable
distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was sinister
to the intellect, and sinister to the heart; especially
when one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom,
and the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next;
for these characteristics, as was inevitable, assumed the
form both of hypocrisy and exaggeration, by being
inherited from the example and precept of other human
beings, and not from an original and spiritual source.
The sons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a
race of lower and narrower souls than their progenitors

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

had been. The latter were stern, severe, intolerant, but
not superstitious, not even fanatical; and endowed, if
any men of that age were, with a far-seeing worldly
sagacity. But it was impossible for the succeeding race
to grow up, in heaven's freedom, beneath the discipline
which their gloomy energy of character had established;
nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the
unfavorable influences which, among many good ones,
were bequeathed to us by our Puritan forefathers. Let
us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and
let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently,
for being one step further from them in the march
of ages.

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

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

Look now at the street, and observe a strange people
entering it. Their garments are torn and disordered,
their faces haggard, their figures emaciated; for they
have made their way hither through pathless deserts,
suffering hunger and hardship, with no other shelter than
a hollow tree, the lair of a wild beast, or an Indian wigwam.
Nor, in the most inhospitable and dangerous of
such lodging-places, was there half the peril that awaits
them in this thoroughfare of Christian men, with those
secure dwellings and warm hearths on either side of it,
and yonder meeting-house as the central object of the
scene. These wanderers have received from Heaven a
gift that, in all epochs of the world, has brought with it
the penalties of mortal suffering and persecution, scorn,
enmity, and death itself;—a gift that, thus terrible to its

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

possessors, has ever been most hateful to all other men,
since its very existence seems to threaten the overthrow
of whatever else the toilsome ages have built up; — the
gift of a new idea. You can discern it in them, illuminating
their faces — their whole persons, indeed, however
earthly and cloddish — with a light that inevitably shines
through, and makes the startled community aware that
these men are not as they themselves are, — not brethren
nor neighbors of their thought. Forthwith, it is as if
an earthquake rumbled through the town, making its
vibrations felt at every hearthstone, and especially causing
the spire of the meeting-house to totter. The
Quakers have come. We are in peril! See! they
trample upon our wise and well-established laws in the
person of our chief magistrate; for Governor Endicott
is passing, now an aged man, and dignified with long
habits of authority, — and not one of the irreverent
vagabonds has moved his hat. Did you note the ominous
frown of the white-bearded Puritan governor, as he
turned himself about, and, in his anger, half uplifted the
staff that has become a needful support to his old age?
Here comes old Mr. Norris, our venerable minister.
Will they doff their hats, and pay reverence to him?
No: their hats stick fast to their ungracious heads, as if
they grew there; and — impious varlets that they are,
and worse than the heathen Indians! — they eye our
reverend pastor with a peculiar scorn, distrust, unbelief,
and utter denial of his sanctified pretensions, of which
he himself immediately becomes conscious; the more
bitterly conscious, as he never knew nor dreamed of the
like before.

But look yonder! Can we believe our eyes? A

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

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

So thought the old Puritans. What was their mode
of action may be partly judged from the spectacles
which now pass before your eyes. Joshua Buffum is
standing in the pillory. Cassandra Southwick is led to
prison. And there a woman, — it is Ann Coleman, —
naked from the waist upward, and bound to the tail of a
cart, is dragged through the Main-street at the pace of a
brisk walk, while the constable follows with a whip of
knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is that constable;
and each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you
see a frown wrinkling and twisting his brow, and, at the
same instant, a smile upon his lips. He loves his business,
faithful officer that he is, and puts his soul into
every stroke, zealous to fulfil the injunction of Major
Hawthrone's warrant, in the spirit and to the letter.

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

There came down a stroke that has drawn blood! Ten
such stripes are to be given in Salem, ten in Boston, and
ten in Dedham; and, with those thirty stripes of blood
upon her, she is to be driven into the forest. The crimson
trail goes wavering along the Main-street; but
Heaven grant that, as the rain of so many years has
wept upon it, time after time, and washed it all away,
so there may have been a dew of mercy, to cleanse this
cruel blood-stain out of the record of the persecutor's
life!

Pass on, thou spectral constable, and betake thee to
thine own place of torment. Meanwhile, by the silent
operation of the mechanism behind the scenes, a considerable
space of time would seem to have lapsed over
the street. The older dwellings now begin to look
weather-beaten, through the effect of the many eastern
storms that have moistened their unpainted shingles and
clapboards, for not less than forty years. Such is the
age we would assign to the town, judging by the aspect
of John Massey, the first town-born child, whom his
neighbors now call Goodman Massey, and whom we see
yonder, a grave, almost autumnal-looking man, with
children of his own about him. To the patriarchs of
the settlement, no doubt, the Main-street is still but an
affair of yesterday, hardly more antique, even if destined
to be more permanent, than a path shovelled through the
snow. But to the middle-aged and elderly men who
came hither in childhood or early youth, it presents the
aspect of a long and well-established work, on which
they have expended the strength and ardor of their life.
And the younger people, native to the street, whose
earliest recollections are of creeping over the paternal

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

threshold, and rolling on the grassy margin of the track,
look at it as one of the perdurable things of our mortal
state, — as old as the hills of the great pasture, or the
headland at the harbor's mouth. Their fathers and
grandsires tell them how, within a few years past, the
forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its
tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it
true and real to their conceptions. With them, moreover,
the Main-street is a street indeed, worthy to hold
its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities
beyond the sea. The old Puritans tell them of the
crowds that hurry along Cheapside and Fleet-street and
the Strand, and of the rush of tumultuous life at Temple
Bar. They describe London Bridge, itself a street, with
a row of houses on each side. They speak of the vast
structure of the Tower, and the solemn grandeur of
Westminster Abbey. The children listen, and still
inquire if the streets of London are longer and broader
than the one before their father's door; if the Tower is
bigger than the jail in Prison-lane; if the old Abbey
will hold a larger congregation than our meeting-house.
Nothing impresses them, except their own experience.

It seems all a fable, too, that wolves have ever
prowled here; and not less so, that the Squaw Sachem,
and the Sagamore her son, once ruled over this region,
and treated as sovereign potentates with the English
settlers, then so few and storm-beaten, now so powerful.
There stand some school-boys, you observe, in a little
group around a drunken Indian, himself a prince of the
Squaw Sachem's lineage. He brought hither some
beaver-skins for sale, and has already swallowed the
larger portion of their price, in deadly draughts of

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

fire-water. Is there not a touch of pathos in that picture?
and does it not go far towards telling the whole story of
the vast growth and prosperity of one race, and the fated
decay of another? — the children of the stranger making
game of the great Squaw Sachem's grandson!

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

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

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

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

sir, do me the favor to take back your money, and withdraw!”

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

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

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

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

The showman deems it best to comply.

Then, here cames the worshipful Captain Curwen,

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

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

There is old George Jacobs, known hereabouts, these
sixty years, as a man whom we thought upright in all
his way of life, quiet, blameless, a good husband before
his pious wife was summoned from the evil to come, and
a good father to the children whom she left him. Ah!
but when that blessed woman went to heaven, George
Jacobs' heart was empty, his hearth lonely, his life
broken up; his children were married, and betook themselves
to habitations of their own; and Satan, in his
wanderings up and down, beheld this forlorn old man, to
whom life was a sameness and a weariness, and found
the way to tempt him. So the miserable sinner was
prevailed with to mount into the air, and career among
the clouds; and he is proved to have been present at a
witch-meeting as far off as Falmouth, on the very same
night that his next neighbors saw him, with his rheumatic
stoop, going in at his own door. There is John
Willard, too; an honest man we thought him, and so
shrewd and active in his business, so practical, so intent
on every-day affairs, so constant at his little place of
trade, where he bartered English goods for Indian corn
and all kinds of country produce! How could such a

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

man find time, or what could put it into his mind, to
leave his proper calling, and become a wizard? It is
a mystery, unless the Black Man tempted him with
great heaps of gold. See that aged couple, — a sad
sight, truly, — John Proctor, and his wife Elizabeth. If
there were two old people in all the County of Essex
who seemed to have led a true Christian life, and to be
treading hopefully the little remnant of their earthly
path, it was this very pair. Yet have we heard it
sworn, to the satisfaction of the worshipful Chief-justice
Sewell, and all the court and jury, that Proctor and his
wife have shown their withered faces at children's bed-sides,
mocking, making mouths, and affrighting the poor
little innocents in the night-time. They, or their spectral
appearances, have stuck pins into the afflicted ones,
and thrown them into deadly fainting-fits with a touch, or
but a look. And, while we supposed the old man to be
reading the Bible to his old wife, — she meanwhile knitting
in the chimney-corner, — the pair of hoary reprobates
have whisked up the chimney, both on one broomstick,
and flown away to a witch-communion, far into the depths
of the chill, dark forest. How foolish! Were it only
for fear of rheumatic pains in their old bones, they had
better have stayed at home. But away they went; and
the laughter of their decayed, cackling voices has been
heard at midnight, aloft in the air. Now, in the sunny
noontide, as they go tottering to the gallows, it is the
devil's turn to laugh.

Behind these two, — who help another along, and
seem to be comforting and encouraging each other, in a
manner truly pitiful, if it were not a sin to pity the old
witch and wizard, — behind them comes a woman, with

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

a dark, proud face that has been beautiful, and a figure
that is still majestic. Do you know her? It is Martha
Carrier, whom the devil found in a humble cottage, and
looked into her discontented heart, and saw pride there,
and tempted her with his promise that she should be
Queen of Hell. And now, with that lofty demeanor,
she is passing to her kingdom, and, by her unquenchable
pride, transforms this escort of shame into a triumphal
procession, that shall attend her to the gates of her infernal
palace, and seat her upon the fiery throne. Within
this hour, she shall assume her royal dignity.

Last of the miserable train comes a man clad in black,
of small stature and a dark complexion, with a clerical
band about his neck. Many a time, in the years gone
by, that face has been uplifted heavenward from the pulpit
of the East Meeting-house, when the Rev. Mr. Burroughs
seemed to worship God. What! — he? The
holy man! — the learned! — the wise! How has the
devil tempted him? His fellow-criminals, for the most
part, are obtuse, uncultivated creatures, some of them
scarcely half-witted by nature, and others greatly
decayed in their intellects through age. They were an
easy prey for the destroyer. Not so with this George
Burroughs, as we judge by the inward light which glows
through his dark countenance, and, we might almost
say, glorifies his figure, in spite of the soil and haggardness
of long imprisonment, — in spite of the heavy
shadow that must fall on him, while death is walking
by his side. What bribe could Satan offer, rich enough
to tempt and overcome this man? Alas! it may have
been in the very strength of his high and searching
intellect, that the Tempter found the weakness which

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

betrayed him. He yearned for knowledge; he went
groping onward into a world of mystery; at first, as the
witnesses have sworn, he summoned up the ghosts of his
two dead wives, and talked with them of matters beyond
the grave; and, when their responses failed to satisfy the
intense and sinful craving of his spirit, he called on
Satan, and was heard. Yet, — to look at him, — who,
that had not known the proof, could believe him guilty?
Who would not say, while we see him offering comfort
to the weak and aged partners of his horrible crime, —
while we hear his ejaculations of prayer, that seem to
bubble up out of the depths of his heart, and fly heaven-ward,
unawares, — while we behold a radiance brightening
on his features as from the other world, which is but
a few steps off, — who would not say, that, over the
dusty track of the Main-street, a Christian saint is now
going to a martyr's death? May not the Arch Fiend
have been too subtle for the court and jury, and betrayed
them — laughing in his sleeve, the while — into the
awful error of pouring out sanctified blood as an acceptable
sacrifice upon God's altar? Ah! no; for listen to
wise Cotton Mather, who, as he sits there on his horse,
speaks comfortably to the perplexed multitude, and tells
them that all has been religiously and justly done, and
that Satan's power shall this day receive its death-blow
in New England.

Heaven grant it be so! — the great scholar must be
right so lead the poor creatures to their death! Do
you see that group of children and half-grown girls, and,
among them, an old, hag-like Indian woman, Tituba by
name? Those are the Afflicted Ones. Behold, at this
very instant, a proof of Satan's power and malice!

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

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

I perceive in your eyes, my indulgent spectators, the
criticism which you are too kind to utter. These
scenes, you think, are all too sombre. So, indeed, they
are; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of our
forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a
single thread of rose-color or gold, and not on me, who
have a tropic-love of sunshine, and would gladly gild all
the world with it, if I knew where to find so much.

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

That you may believe me, I will exhibit one of the only
class of scenes, so far as my investigation has taught me,
in which our ancestors were wont to steep their tough
old hearts in wine and strong drink, and indulge an out-break
of grisly jollity.

Here it comes, out of the same house whence we saw
brave Captain Gardner go forth to the wars. What!
A coffin, borne on men's shoulders, and six aged gentlemen
as pall-bearers, and a long train of mourners, with
black gloves and black hat-bands, and everything black,
save a white handkerchief in each mourner's hand, to
wipe away his tears withal. Now, my kind patrons,
you are angry with me. You were bidden to a bridaldance,
and find yourselves walking in a funeral procession.
Even so; but look back through all the social
customs of New England, in the first century of her
existence, and read all her traits of character; and if
you find one occasion, other than a funeral feast, where
jollity was sanctioned by universal practice, I will set
fire to my puppet-show without another word. These
are the obsequies of old Governor Bradstreet, the patriarch
and survivor of the first settlers, who, having inter-married
with the Widow Gardner, is now resting from
his labors, at the great age of ninety-four. The white-bearded
corpse, which was his spirit's earthly garniture,
now lies beneath yonder coffin-lid. Many a cask of ale
and cider is on tap, and many a draught of spiced wine
and aqua-vitæ has been quaffed. Else why should the
bearers stagger, as they tremulously uphold the coffin?—
and the aged pall-bearers, too, as they strive to walk
solemnly beside it? — and wherefore do the mourners
tread on one another's heels? — and why, if we may ask

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

without offence, should the nose of the Reverend Mr.
Noyes, through which he has just been delivering the
funeral discourse, glow like a ruddy coal of fire? Well,
well, old friends! Pass on, with your burthen of mortality,
and lay it in the tomb with jolly hearts. People
should be permitted to enjoy themselves in their own
fashion; every man to his taste; but New England
must have been a dismal abode for the man of pleasure,
when the only boon-companion was Death!

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

Behold here a change, wrought in the twinkling of an

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

domestic peace, the sports of children, and the quietude
of age, are living yet, in spite of the frozen crust above
them.

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

Alas! my kind and gentle audience, you know not
the extent of your misfortune. The scenes to come
were far better than the past. The street itself would
have been more worthy of pictorial exhibition; the deeds
of its inhabitants, not less so. And how would your
interest have deepened, as, passing out of the cold
shadow of antiquity, in my long and weary course, I
should arrive within the limits of man's memory, and,
leading you at last into the sunshine of the present,
should give a reflex of the very life that is flitting past
us! Your own beauty, my fair townswomen, would
have beamed upon you, out of my scene. Not a gentleman
that walks the street but should have beheld his
own face and figure, his gait, the peculiar swing of his
arm, and the coat that he put on yesterday. Then, too,—
and it is what I chiefly regret,—I had expended a vast

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

deal of light and brilliancy on a representation of the
street in its whole length, from Buffum's Corner down-ward,
on the night of the grand illumination for General
Taylor's triumph. Lastly, I should have given the
crank one other turn, and have brought out the future,
showing you who shall walk the Main-street to-morrow,
and, perchance, whose funeral shall pass through it!

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

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

p578-109 ETHAN BRAND: A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE.

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

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.

“O, 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

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

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 oven-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

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

themselves into the chinks of the stones, look already
like relics of antiquity, and may yet be overspread with
the lichens of centuries to come. Others, where the
lime-burner still feeds his daily and night-long fire,
afford points of interest to the wanderer among the hills,
who seats himself on a log of wood or a fragment of
marble, to hold a chat with the solitary man. It is a
lonesome, and, when the character is inclined to thought,
may be an intensely thoughtful occupation; as it proved
in the case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to such
strange purpose, in days gone by, while the fire in this
very kiln was burning.

The man who now watched the fire was of a different
order, and troubled himself with no thoughts save the
very few that were requisite to his business. At frequent
intervals, he flung back the clashing weight of the iron
door, and, turning his face from the insufferable glare,
thrust in huge logs of oak, or stirred the immense brands
with a long pole. Within the furnace were seen the
curling and riotous flames, and the burning marble,
almost molten with the intensity of heat; while without,
the reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy
of the surrounding forest, and showed in the foreground
a bright and ruddy little picture of the hut, the spring
beside its door, the athletic and coal-begrimed figure of
the lime-burner, and the half-frightened child, shrinking
into the protection of his father's shadow. And when
again the iron door was closed, then reäppeared 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

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

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,

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

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 new comer 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

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

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. The lime-burner's
own sins rose up within 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

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

suspected his strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke
a fiend, at least to plunge bodily 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 further 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

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

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 fire-light 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, bob-tailed 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 shirt-sleeves and tow-cloth trousers.
This poor fellow had been an attorney, in what he
called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and in great

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

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 for 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

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

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 horse-back
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,

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological
experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated
her soul, in the process.

“Yes,” murmured he, 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 sun-burnt 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!”

“O, 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

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

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 Nuremburg,
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

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

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, 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 fire-light glimmered on the stately

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

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 spirits 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

[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]

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

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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 red-hot
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 bont
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

[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]

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

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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

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

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.

p578-132 A BELL'S BIOGRAPHY.

[figure description] Page 125.[end figure description]

Hearken to our neighbor with the iron tongue!
While I sit musing over my sheet of foolscap, he
emphatically tells the hour, in tones loud enough for all
the town to hear, though doubtless intended only as a
gentle hint to myself, that I may begin his biography
before the evening shall be further wasted. Unquestionably,
a personage in such an elevated position, and
making so great a noise in the world, has a fair claim
to the services of a biographer. He is the representative
and most illustrious member of that innumerable
class, whose characteristic feature is the tongue, and
whose sole business, to clamor for the public good. If
any of his noisy brethren, in our tongue-governed
democracy, be envious of the superiority which I have
assigned him, they have my free consent to hang themselves
as high as he. And, for his history, let not the
reader apprehend an empty repetition of ding-dong-bell.
He has been the passive hero of wonderful vicissitudes,
with which I have chanced to become acquainted, possibly
from his own mouth; while the careless multitude
supposed him to be talking merely of the time of day,
or calling them to dinner or to church, or bidding drowsy
people go bedward, or the dead to their graves. Many
a revolution has it been his fate to go through, and

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invariably with a prodigious uproar. And whether or no he
have told me his reminiscences, this at least is true, that
the more I study his deep-toned language, the more
sense, and sentiment, and soul, do I discover in it.

This bell — for we may as well drop our quaint personification—
is of antique French manufacture, and the
symbol of the cross betokens that it was meant to be
suspended in the belfry of a Romish place of worship.
The old people hereabout have a tradition, that a considerable
part of the metal was supplied by a brass
cannon, captured in one of the victories of Louis the
Fourteenth over the Spaniards, and that a Bourbon
princess threw her golden crucifix into the molten mass.
It is said, likewise, that a bishop baptized and blessed
the bell, and prayed that a heavenly influence might
mingle with its tones. When all due ceremonies had
been performed, the Grand Monarque bestowed the gift—
than which none could resound his beneficence more
loudly — on the Jesuits, who were then converting the
American Indians to the spiritual dominion of the Pope.
So the bell, — our self-same bell, whose familiar voice
we may hear at all hours, in the streets, — this very bell
sent forth its first-born accents from the tower of a log-built
chapel, westward of Lake Champlain, and near the
mighty stream of the Saint Lawrence. It was called
Our Lady's Chapel of the Forest. The peal went forth
as if to redeem and consecrate the heathen wilderness.
The wolf growled at the sound, as he prowled stealthily
through the underbrush; the grim bear turned his
back, and stalked sullenly away; the startled doe leaped
up, and led her fawn into a deeper solitude. The
red men wondered what awful voice was speaking amid

[figure description] Page 127.[end figure description]

the wind that roared through the tree-tops; and following
reverentially its summons, the dark-robed fathers
blessed them, as they drew near the cross-crowned
chapel. In a little time, there was a crucifix on every
dusky bosom. The Indians knelt beneath the lowly
roof, worshipping in the same forms that were observed
under the vast dome of Saint Peter's, when the Pope
performed high mass in the presence of kneeling princes.
All the religious festivals, that awoke the chiming bells
of lofty cathedrals, called forth a peal from Our Lady's
Chapel of the Forest. Loudly rang the bell of the
wilderness while the streets of Paris echoed with
rejoicings for the birth-day of the Bourbon, or whenever
France had triumphed on some European battle-field.
And the solemn woods were suddened with a melancholy
knell, as often as the thick-strewn leaves were swept
away from the virgin soil, for the burial of an Indian
chief.

Meantime, the bells of a hostile people and a hostile
faith were ringing on Sabbaths and lecture-days, at
Boston and other Puritan towns. Their echoes died
away hundreds of miles south-eastward of Our Lady's
Chapel. But scouts had threaded the pathless desert
that lay between, and, from behind the huge tree-trunks,
perceived the Indians assembling at the summons of the
bell. Some bore flaxen-haired scalps at their girdles, as
if to lay those bloody trophies on Our Lady's altar. It
was reported, and believed, all through New England,
that the Pope of Rome, and the King of France, had
established this little chapel in the forest, for the purpose
of stirring up the red men to a crusade against the
English settlers. The latter took energetic measures to

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secure their religion and their lives. On the eve of an
especial fast of the Romish church, while the bell tolled
dismally, and the priests were chanting a doleful stave,
a band of New England rangers rushed from the surrounding
woods. Fierce shouts, and the report of
musketry, pealed suddenly within the chapel. The
ministering priests threw themselves before the altar, and
were slain even on its steps. If, as antique traditions
tell us, no grass will grow where the blood of martyrs
has been shed, there should be a barren spot, to this very
day, on the site of that desecrated altar.

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

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

“Nay, then,” answered the captain, “if good Mr.

[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]

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

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

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

But there lay the bell, for many silent years; and the
wonder is, that he did not lie silent there a century, or
perhaps a dozen centuries, till the world should have forgotten
not only his voice, but the voices of the whole
brotherhood of bells. How would the first accent of his
iron tongue have startled his resurrectionists! But he
was not fated to be a subject of discussion among the
antiquaries of far posterity. Near the close of the Old
French War, a party of New England axe-men, who
preceded the march of Colonel Bradstreet toward Lake
Ontario, were building a bridge of logs through a swamp.
Plunging down a stake, one of these pioneers felt it
graze against some hard, smooth substance. He called
his comrades, and, by their united efforts, the top of the
bell was raised to the surface, a rope made fast to it, and
thence passed over the horizontal limb of a tree. Heaveoh!
up they hoisted their prize, dripping with moisture,
and festooned with verdant water-moss. As the base of
the bell emerged from the swamp, the pioneers perceived
that a skeleton was clinging with its bony fingers to the
clapper, but immediately relaxing its nerveless grasp,
sank back into the stagnant water. The bell then gave
forth a sullen clang. No wonder that he was in haste
to speak, after holding his tongue for such a length of
time! The pioneers shoved the bell to and fro, thus
ringing a loud and heavy peal, which echoed widely

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through the forest, and reached the ears of Colonel
Bradstreet, and his three thousand men. The soldiers
paused on their march; a feeling of religion, mingled
with home-tenderness, overpowered their rude hearts;
each seemed to hear the clangor of the old church-bell,
which had been familiar to him from infancy, and had
tolled at the funerals of all his forefathers. By what
magic had that holy sound strayed over the wide-murmuring
ocean, and become audible amid the clash of
arms, the loud crashing of the artillery over the rough
wilderness-path, and the melancholy roar of the wind
among the boughs?

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

Ever since that period, our hero has occupied the
same elevated station, and has put in his word on all
matters of public importance, civil, military, or religious.

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On the day when Independence was first proclaimed in
the street beneath, he uttered a peal which many deemed
ominous and fearful, rather than triumphant. But he
has told the same story these sixty years, and none mistake
his meaning now. When Washington, in the
fulness of his glory, rode through our flower-strewn
streets, this was the tongue that bade the Father of his
Country welcome! Again the same voice was heard,
when La Fayette came to gather in his half-century's
harvest of gratitude. Meantime, vast changes have been
going on below. His voice, which once floated over a
little provincial seaport, is now reverberated between
brick edifices, and strikes the ear amid the buzz and
tumult of a city. On the Sabbaths of olden time, the
summons of the bell was obeyed by a picturesque and
varied throng; stately gentlemen in purple velvet coats,
embroidered waistcoats, white wigs and gold-laced hats,
stepping with grave courtesy beside ladies in flowered
satin gowns, and hoop-petticoats of majestic circumference;
while behind followed a liveried slave or bondsman,
bearing the psalm-book, and a stove for his mistress'
feet. The commonalty, clad in homely garb, gave precedence
to their betters at the door of the meeting-house,
as if admitting that there were distinctions between
them, even in the sight of God. Yet, as their coffins
were borne one after another through the street, the bell
has tolled a requiem for all alike. What mattered it,
whether or no there were a silver scutcheon on the
coffin-lid? “Open thy bosom, Mother Earth!” Thus
spake the bell. “Another of thy children is coming to
his long rest. Take him to thy bosom, and let him
slumber in peace.” Thus spake the bell, and Mother

[figure description] Page 133.[end figure description]

Earth received her child. With the self-same tones will
the present generation be ushered to the embraces of
their mother; and Mother Earth will still receive her
children. Is not thy tongue a-weary, mournful talker
of two centuries? O, funeral bell! wilt thou never be
shattered with thine own melancholy strokes? Yea,
and a trumpet-call shall arouse the sleepers, whom thy
heavy clang could awake no more!

Again — again, thy voice, reminding me that I am
wasting the “midnight oil.” In my lonely fantasy, I
can scarce believe that other mortals have caught the
sound, or that it vibrates elsewhere than in my secret
soul. But to many hast thou spoken. Anxious men
have heard thee on their sleepless pillows, and bethought
themselves anew of to-morrow's care. In a brief interval
of wakefulness, the sons of toil have heard thee, and
say, “Is so much of our quiet slumber spent? — is the
morning so near at hand?” Crime has heard thee, and
mutters, “Now is the very hour!” Despair answers
thee, “Thus much of this weary life is gone!” The
young mother, on her bed of pain and ecstasy, has
counted thy echoing strokes, and dates from them her
first-born's share of life and immortality. The bridegroom
and the bride have listened, and feel that their
night of rapture flits like a dream away. Thine accents
have fallen faintly on the ear of the dying man, and
warned him that, ere thou speakest again, his spirit shall
have passed whither no voice of time can ever reach.
Alas for the departing traveller, if thy voice — the voice
of fleeting time — have taught him no lessons for Eternity!

p578-141 SYLPH ETHEREGE.

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On a bright summer evening, two persons stood
among the shrubbery of a garden, stealthily watching a
young girl, who sat in the window-seat of a neighboring
mansion. One of these unseen observers, a gentleman,
was youthful, and had an air of high breeding and
refinement, and a face marked with intellect, though
otherwise of unprepossessing aspect. His features wore
even an ominous, though somewhat mirthful expression,
while he pointed his long forefinger at the girl, and
seemed to regard her as a creature completely within
the scope of his influence.

“The charm works!” said he, in a low, but emphatic
whisper.

“Do you know, Edward Hamilton, — since so you
choose to be named, — do you know,” said the lady
beside him, “that I have almost a mind to break the
spell at once? What if the lesson should prove too
severe! True, if my ward could be thus laughed out
of her fantastic nonsense, she might be the better for it
through life. But then, she is such a delicate creature!
And, besides, are you not ruining your own chance, by
putting forward this shadow of a rival?”

“But will he not vanish into thin air, at my bidding?”
rejoined Edward Hamilton. “Let the charm
work!”

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The girl's slender and sylph-like figure, tinged with
radiance from the sunset clouds, and overhung with the
rich drapery of the silken curtains, and set within the
deep frame of the window, was a perfect picture; or,
rather, it was like the original loveliness in a painter's
fancy, from which the most finished picture is but
an imperfect copy. Though her occupation excited so
much interest in the two spectators, she was merely
gazing at a miniature which she held in her hand,
encased in white satin and red morocco; nor did there
appear to be any other cause for the smile of mockery
and malice with which Hamilton regarded her.

“The charm works!” muttered he, again. “Our
pretty Sylvia's scorn will have a dear retribution!”

At this moment the girl raised her eyes, and, instead
of a life-like semblance of the miniature, beheld the illomened
shape of Edward Hamilton, who now stepped
forth from his concealment in the shrubbery.

Sylvia Etherege was an orphan girl, who had spent
her life, till within a few months past, under the guardianship,
and in the secluded dwelling, of an old bachelor
uncle. While yet in her cradle, she had been the destined
bride of a cousin, who was no less passive in the
betrothal than herself. Their future union had been
projected, as the means of uniting two rich estates, and
was rendered highly expedient, if not indispensable, by
the testamentary dispositions of the parents on both
sides. Edgar Vaughan, the promised bridegroom, had
been bred from infancy in Europe, and had never seen
the beautiful girl whose heart he was to claim as his
inheritance. But already, for several years, a correspondence
had been kept up between the cousins, and

[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]

had produced an intellectual intimacy, though it could
but imperfectly acquaint them with each other's character.

Sylvia was shy, sensitive, and fanciful; and her
guardian's secluded habits had shut her out from even
so much of the world as is generally open to maidens
of her age. She had been left to seek associates and
friends for herself in the haunts of imagination, and
to converse with them, sometimes in the language of
dead poets, oftener in the poetry of her own mind.
The companion whom she chiefly summoned up was
the cousin with whose idea her earliest thoughts had
been connected. She made a vision of Edgar Vaughan,
and tinted it with stronger hues than a mere fancy-picture,
yet graced it with so many bright and delicate
perfections, that her cousin could nowhere have encountered
so dangerous a rival. To this shadow she cherished
a romantic fidelity. With its airy presence sitting
by her side, or gliding along her favorite paths, the
loneliness of her young life was blissful; her heart was
satisfied with love, while yet its virgin purity was
untainted by the earthliness that the touch of a real
lover would have left there. Edgar Vaughan seemed
to be conscious of her character; for, in his letters, he
gave her a name that was happily appropriate to the
sensitiveness of her disposition, the delicate peculiarity
of her manners, and the ethereal beauty both of her
mind and person. Instead of Sylvia, he called her
Sylph, — with the prerogative of a cousin and a lover, —
his dear Sylph Etherege.

When Sylvia was seventeen, her guardian died, and
she passed under the care of Mrs. Grosvenor, a lady

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of wealth and fashion, and Sylvia's nearest relative,
though a distant one. While an inmate of Mrs. Grosvenor's
family, she still preserved somewhat of her life-long
habits of seclusion, and shrank from a too familiar
intercourse with those around her. Still, too, she was
faithful to her cousin, or to the shadow which bore his
name.

The time now drew near when Edgar Vaughan,
whose education had been completed by an extensive
range of travel, was to revisit the soil of his nativity.
Edward Hamilton, a young gentleman, who had been
Vaughan's companion, both in his studies and rambles,
had already recrossed the Atlantic, bringing letters to
Mrs. Grosvenor and Sylvia Etherege. These credentials
insured him an earnest welcome, which, however,
on Sylvia's part, was not followed by personal partiality,
or even the regard that seemed due to her cousin's most
intimate friend. As she herself could have assigned no
cause for her repugnance, it might be termed instinctive.
Hamilton's person, it is true, was the reverse of attractive,
especially when beheld for the first time. Yet, in
the eyes of the most fastidious judges, the defect of
natural grace was compensated by the polish of his
manners, and by the intellect which so often gleamed
through his dark features. Mrs. Grosvenor, with whom
he immediately became a prodigious favorite, exerted
herself to overcome Sylvia's dislike. But, in this
matter, her ward could neither be reasoned with nor
persuaded. The presence of Edward Hamilton was
sure to render her cold, shy, and distant, abstracting all
the vivacity from her deportment, as if a cloud had
come betwixt her and the sunshine.

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The simplicity of Sylvia's demeanor rendered it easy
for so keen an observer as Hamilton to detect her feelings.
Whenever any slight circumstance made him
sensible of them, a smile might be seen to flit over the
young man's sallow visage. None, that had once beheld
this smile, were in any danger of forgetting it; whenever
they recalled to memory the features of Edward
Hamilton, they were always duskily illuminated by this
expression of mockery and malice.

In a few weeks after Hamilton's arrival, he presented
to Sylvia Etherege a miniature of her cousin, which,
as he informed her, would have been delivered sooner,
but was detained with a portion of his baggage. This
was the miniature in the contemplation of which we
beheld Sylvia so absorbed, at the commencement of our
story. Such, in truth, was too often the habit of the
shy and musing girl. The beauty of the pictured countenance
was almost too perfect to represent a human
creature, that had been born of a fallen and world-worn
race, and had lived to manhood amid ordinary troubles
and enjoyments, and must become wrinkled with age
and care. It seemed too bright for a thing formed of
dust, and doomed to crumble into dust again. Sylvia
feared that such a being would be too refined and delicate
to love a simple girl like her. Yet, even while her
spirit drooped with that apprehension, the picture was
but the masculine counterpart of Sylph Etherege's
sylph-like beauty. There was that resemblance between
her own face and the miniature which is said often
to exist between lovers whom Heaven has destined for
each other, and which, in this instance, might be owing
to the kindred blood of the two parties. Sylvia felt,

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indeed, that there was something familiar in the countenance,
so like a friend did the eyes smile upon her,
and seem to imply a knowledge of her thoughts. She
could account for this impression only by supposing
that, in some of her day-dreams, imagination had conjured
up the true similitude of her distant and unseen
lover.

But now could Sylvia give a brighter semblance of
reality to those day-dreams. Clasping the miniature to
her heart, she could summon forth, from that haunted
cell of pure and blissful fantasies, the life-like shadow,
to roam with her in the moonlight garden. Even at
noontide it sat with her in the arbor, when the sunshine
threw its broken flakes of gold into the clustering shade.
The effect upon her mind was hardly less powerful
than if she had actually listened to, and reciprocated,
the vows of Edgar Vaughan; for, though the illusion
never quite deceived her, yet the remembrance was as
distinct as of a remembered interview. Those heavenly
eyes gazed forever into her soul, which drank at them
as at a fountain, and was disquieted if reality threw a
momentary cloud between. She heard the melody of a
voice breathing sentiments with which her own chimed
in like music. O, happy, yet hapless girl! Thus to
create the being whom she loves, to endow him with all
the attributes that were most fascinating to her heart,
and then to flit with the airy creature into the realm
of fantasy and moonlight, where dwelt his dreamy kindred!
For her lover wiled Sylvia away from earth,
which seemed strange, and dull, and darksome, and
lured her to a country where her spirit roamed in
peaceful rapture, deeming that it had found its home.

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Many, in their youth, have visited that land of dreams,
and wandered so long in its enchanted groves, that,
when banished thence, they feel like exiles everywhere.

The dark-browed Edward Hamilton, like the villain
of a tale, would often glide through the romance wherein
poor Sylvia walked. Sometimes, at the most blissful
moment of her ecstasy, when the features of the miniature
were pictured brightest in the air, they would suddenly
change, and darken, and be transformed into his
visage. And always, when such change occurred, the
intrusive visage wore that peculiar smile with which
Hamilton had glanced at Sylvia.

Before the close of summer, it was told Sylvia
Etherege that Vaughan had arrived from France, and
that she would meet him — would meet, for the first
time, the loved of years — that very evening. We will
not tell how often and how earnestly she gazed upon
the miniature, thus endeavoring to prepare herself for
the approaching interview, lest the throbbing of her
timorous heart should stifle the words of welcome.
While the twilight grew deeper and duskier, she sat
with Mrs. Grosvenor in an inner apartment, lighted only
by the softened gleam from an alabaster lamp, which
was burning at a distance on the centre-table of the
drawing-room. Never before had Sylph Etherege
looked so sylph-like. She had communed with a creature
of imagination, till her own loveliness seemed but
the creation of a delicate and dreamy fancy. Every
vibration of her spirit was visible in her frame, as she
listened to the rattling of wheels and the tramp upon the
pavement, and deemed that even the breeze bore the
sound of her lover's footsteps, as if he trode upon the

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viewless air. Mrs. Grosvenor, too, while she watched
the tremulous flow of Sylvia's feelings, was deeply
moved; she looked uneasily at the agitated girl, and
was about to speak, when the opening of the street door
arrested the words upon her lips.

Footsteps ascended the staircase, with a confident and
familiar tread, and some one entered the drawing-room.
From the sofa where they sat, in the inner apartment,
Mrs. Grosvenor and Sylvia could not discern the visiter.

“Sylph!” cried a voice. “Dearest Sylph! Where
are you, sweet Sylph Etherege? Here is your Edgar
Vaughan!”

But instead of answering, or rising to meet her lover,—
who had greeted her by the sweet and fanciful name,
which, appropriate as it was to her character, was known
only to him, — Sylvia grasped Mrs. Grosvenor's arm,
while her whole frame shook with the throbbing of her
heart.

“Who is it?” gasped she. “Who calls me Sylph?”

Before Mrs. Grosvenor could reply, the stranger
entered the room, bearing the lamp in his hand.
Approaching the sofa, he displayed to Sylvia the features
of Edward Hamilton, illuminated by that evil
smile, from which his face derived so marked an individuality.

“Is not the miniature an admirable likeness?” inquired
he.

Sylvia shuddered, but had not power to turn away
her white face from his gaze. The miniature, which
she had been holding in her hand, fell down upon the
floor, where Hamilton, or Vaughan, set his foot upon it,
and crushed the ivory counterfeit to fragments.

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“There, my sweet Sylph!” he exclaimed. “It was
I that created your phantom-lover, and now I annihilate
him! Your dream is rudely broken. Awake, Sylph
Etherege, awake to truth! I am the only Edgar
Vaughan!”

“We have gone too far, Edgar Vaughan,” said Mrs.
Grosvenor, catching Sylvia in her arms. The revengeful
freak, which Vaughan's wounded vanity had suggested,
had been countenanced by this lady, in the hope
of curing Sylvia of her romantic notions, and reconciling
her to the truths and realities of life. “Look at the
poor child!” she continued. “I protest I tremble for
the consequences!”

“Indeed, madam!” replied Vaughan, sneeringly, as
he threw the light of the lamp on Sylvia's closed eyes
and marble features. “Well, my conscience is clear.
I did but look into this delicate creature's heart; and
with the pure fantasies that I found there, I made what
seemed a man, — and the delusive shadow has wiled her
away to Shadow-land, and vanished there! It is no
new tale. Many a sweet maid has shared the lot of
poor Sylph Etherege!”

“And now, Edgar Vaughan,” said Mrs. Grosvenor,
as Sylvia's heart began faintly to throb again, “now try,
in good earnest, to win back her love from the phantom
which you conjured up. If you succeed, she will be the
better, her whole life long, for the lesson we have given
her.”

Whether the result of the lesson corresponded with
Mrs. Grosvenor's hopes, may be gathered from the
closing scene of our story. It had been made known
to the fashionable world that Edgar Vaughan had

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returned from France, and, under the assumed name
of Edward Hamilton, had won the affections of the
lovely girl to whom he had been affianced in his boyhood.
The nuptials were to take place at an early
date. One evening, before the day of anticipated bliss
arrived, Edgar Vaughan entered Mrs. Grosvenor's drawing-room,
where he found that lady and Sylph Etherege.

“Only that Sylvia makes no complaint,” remarked
Mrs. Grosvenor, “I should apprehend that the town air
is ill-suited to her constitution. She was always,
indeed, a delicate creature; but now she is a mere gossamer.
Do but look at her! Did you ever imagine
anything so fragile?”

Vaughan was already attentively observing his mistress,
who sat in a shadowy and moonlighted recess of
the room, with her dreamy eyes fixed steadfastly upon
his own. The bough of a tree was waving before the
window, and sometimes enveloped her in the gloom of
its shadow, into which she seemed to vanish.

“Yes,” he said, to Mrs. Grosvenor. “I can scarcely
deem her `of the earth, earthy.' No wonder that I call
her Sylph! Methinks she will fade into the moonlight,
which falls upon her through the window. Or, in the
open air, she might flit away upon the breeze, like a
wreath of mist!”

Sylvia's eyes grew yet brighter. She waved her
hand to Edgar Vaughan, with a gesture of ethereal
triumph.

“Farewell!” she said. “I will neither fade into the
moonlight, nor flit away upon the breeze. Yet you
cannot keep me here!”

There was something in Sylvia's look and tones that

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startled Mrs. Grosvenor with a terrible apprehension.
But, as she was rushing towards the girl, Vaughan held
her back.

“Stay!” cried he, with a strange smile of mockery
and anguish. “Can our sweet Sylph be going to
heaven, to seek the original of the miniature?”

p578-152 THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS.

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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

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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 further 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.

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