One September night a family had gathered round their hearth and piled it high with the driftwood of mountain streams, the dry cones of the pine, and the splintered ruins of great trees that had come crashing down the precipice. Up the chimney roared the fire and brightened the room with its broad blaze. The faces of the father and mother had a sober gladness; the children laughed. The eldest daughter was the image of Happiness at seventeen, and the aged grandmother, who sat knitting in the warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old. They had found the “herb heart’s-ease” in the bleakest spot of all New England. This family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the wind was sharp throughout the year and pitilessly cold in the winter, giving their cottage all its fresh inclemency before it descended on the valley of the Saco. They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one, for a mountain towered above their heads so steep that the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight.
The daughter had just uttered some simple jest that filled them all with mirth, when the wind came through the Notch and seemed to pause before their cottage, rattling the door with a sound of wailing and lamentation before it passed into the valley. For a moment it saddened them, though there was nothing unusual in the tones. But the family were glad again when they perceived that the latch was lifted by some traveller whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast which heralded his approach and wailed as he was entering, and went moaning away from the door.
Though they dwelt in such a solitude, these people held daily converse with the world. The romantic pass of the Notch is a great artery through which the life-blood of internal commerce is continually throbbing between Maine on one side and the Green Mountains and the shores of the St. Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew up before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but his staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night, and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime and steal a kiss from the mountain-maid at parting.
It was one of those intervals, which sometimes occur in such a life, when a retired household—simple enough to be not widely distinguished from the nobility of nature—by a sudden impulse of greatness, begins to live in thought and feeling beyond its daily life. What were the familiar thoughts of the father, the mother, the eldest daughter, and even the aged grandmother, it would be hard to say. The father’s mind was roaming in some valley of the past, pondering on the times and manners that had brightened his youthful days. The mother’s had scarcely travelled a mile from home, yet her fancy was busy with its little world within that hospitable parlor. The daughter had begun to assume a maiden’s place in her dreams, though as yet her thoughts scarcely ventured beyond the verge of girlhood. The old grandmother had sight dimly fixed on the golden clouds at sunset, thinking that now her setting sun was giving her leave to die.
When the wayfarer entered the cottage, the whole family bade him welcome. They pressed the stranger to share their supper, drew his chair to their circle around the hearth, and made him one of themselves. The simple mountain people felt that they had opened their door to the world that night. The guest, in turn, found himself amid such kind and genial faces that he confided his story and his plans to them freely. He was a young man, traveling by foot to seek his fortune, full of deep thought and enthusiasm, and he had a proud dream: he longed to make a name for himself that would echo through the future.
As the fire crackled and the night wind howled faintly outside, the ambitious guest spoke of his desires. He told them he had no rich birth or inheritance, but was determined that posterity should at least hear his name. “You laugh at me,” said he, taking the eldest daughter’s hand and laughing himself. “You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were to freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington only that people might spy at me from the country roundabout. And truly that would be a noble pedestal for a man’s statue.”
“It is better to sit here by this fire,” answered the girl, blushing, “and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us.”
“I suppose,” said her father, after a fit of musing, “there is something natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had been turned that way, I might have felt just the same.—It is strange, wife, how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty certain never to come to pass.”
“Perhaps they may,” observed the wife. “Is the man thinking what he will do when he is a widower?”
“No, no!” cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. “When I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine too. But I was wishing we had a good farm in Bartlett or Bethlehem or Littleton, or some other township round the White Mountains, but not where they could tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with my neighbors and be called squire and sent to General Court for a term or two; for a plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble one, with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know that I lived an honest man and died a Christian.”
“There, now!” exclaimed the stranger; “it is our nature to desire a monument, be it slate or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious memory in the universal heart of man.”
“We’re in a strange way to-night,” said the wife, with tears in her eyes. “They say it’s a sign of something when folks’ minds go a-wandering so. Hark to the wind!”
The old grandmother, who had been sitting silently, now spoke in her trembling voice: “Old folks have their daydreams, too. If I were to have my dearest wish, it would be for a long, gentle slope of a pathway down this mountain, that I might walk safely to the village church every Sabbath. And when it pleased God to call me, I would have you lay me to rest in the valley, next to your grandfather. Yet I trust God will remember me even on this lonely mountainside.”
The young stranger listened, his ambition tempered by the family’s humble wishes. In this warm circle, his heart swelled with a new feeling of kinship and affection. For a moment, his lofty aspirations mingled with the homely hopes around him, and all understood one another.
Suddenly, a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar of a blast, grew broad, deep, and terrible. The house and all within trembled; the foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound were the peal of the last trump. Young and old exchanged one wild glance and remained an instant pale, affrighted, without utterance or power to move. Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all their lips: “The slide! The slide!”
The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot, where, in contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared. Alas! They had quitted their security and fled right into the pathway of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain in a cataract of ruin. Just before it reached the house the rocky stream broke into two branches, shivered not a window there, but overwhelmed the whole vicinity, blocked up the road and annihilated everything in its dreadful course. Long ere the thunder of that great slide had ceased to roar among the mountains, the mortal agony had been endured and the victims were at peace. Their bodies were never found.
The next morning the light smoke was seen stealing from the cottage chimney up the mountainside. Within, the fire was yet smouldering on the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants had but gone forth to view the devastation of the slide and would shortly return to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape. All had left separate tokens by which those who had known the family were made to shed a tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has been told far and wide, and will for ever be a legend of these mountains. Poets have sung their fate.
There were circumstances which led some to suppose that a stranger had been received into the cottage on that awful night, and had shared the catastrophe of all its inmates; others denied that there were sufficient grounds for such a conjecture. Woe for the high-souled youth with his dream of earthly immortality! His name and person utterly unknown, his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never to be solved, his death and his existence equally a doubt — whose was the agony of that death-moment?
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