There are in Elizabethtown two inns,3 one down by the stream, a branch of the Boquet, and the other up on the 'Plain,' near the court house. The latter has decidedly the advantage in situation. Both are owned by the same landlord, and are well kept. We arrived in the midst of court week, and found every place filled with lawyers, clients, witnesses, and even, behind the bars of the brick jail, we could see the prisoners, more fortunate than their city compeers, in that they breathed pure air, and could look out upon the everlasting hills, solemn preachers of the might and the rights, as well as the mercy of their Creator.
From two to three miles from the Valley House is the top of Raven Hill, seemingly a watchtower on the outskirts of the citadel of the Adirondacs. The ascent is easy, and the view panoramic, embracing Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains, Burlington and Westport, the bare, craggy hills to the north, the higher ranges to the west, with the abrupt precipices of the 'Keene Pass' and the lofty 'Dome' and 'Bald Mountain,' Dix's Peak to the south, a clear lake known as 'Black Pond' among the hills toward Moriah, and at the base the Pleasant Valley with the winding Boquet River.
Near the lower hotel is Wood Mountain, about half as high as Raven Hill, and offering a view somewhat similar, although of course not so extended. The distance to the top is but little over a mile, and the pathway, although somewhat steep, is very good.
A visit to the iron mines and works at Moriah can readily be made from Elizabethtown. The distance is from twelve to fourteen miles. One of the mines is quite picturesque, being cut into the solid rock, under a roof supported by great columns of the valuable ore. The workmen, with their picks and barrows, passing to and fro, as seen from the top of the excavation, look like German pictures of tiny gnomes and elves delving for precious minerals. The yield from the ore is about eighty per cent., and of very superior quality. The return road passes down the hill, whence is the splendid view of the 'Valley' before mentioned.
A delightful excursion can also be made to 'Split Rock,' about nine miles up the valley of the Boquet. The little river there, in two separate falls, makes its way through a rocky cleft. The basins of the upper, and the singularly winding chasm of the lower fall, are especially worthy of observation. At Split Rock we first made any extensive acquaintance with a costume which threatens to be immensely popular among the Adirondacs, namely, the Bloomer, and in the agility displayed by some of its fair wearers we beheld the results likely to spring from its adoption as a mountain walking dress. Our private observation was, that moderately full, short skirts, without hoop of course, terminating a little distance above the ankle, and worn with clocked or striped woollen stockings, were more graceful than a somewhat shorter and scantier skirt, with the pantalette extending down to the foot. The former seems really à la paysanne, while the latter, in addition to some want of grace, suggests Bloomer, and the many absurdities which have been connected with that name. It is a great pity that a sensible and healthful change in walking attire should have been caricatured by its own advocates, and thus rendered too conspicuous to be agreeable to many who would otherwise have adopted it in some modified and reasonable form.
Near New Russia, about five miles from Elizabethtown, is a brook flowing among moss-covered stones and rocks, overhung by giant trees of the original forest; and just out of Elizabethtown is a glen, through which pours a pretty stream, making pleasant little cascades under the shadow of a less aged wood, and within a bordering of beautiful ferns, running pines, and bright forest blossoms. We should also not neglect to mention Cobble Hill, a bold pile of rocks, rising directly out of the plain on which a portion of the town is situated.
But we had heard of the 'Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,' and Elsie and I could not rest until our own eyes had witnessed that they were worthy of their reputation. We left Elizabethtown at half past six in the morning, our team a fast pair of ponies, belonging to our landlord. The previous days had been warm and obstinately hazy, but for that especial occasion the atmosphere cooled and cleared, and lent us some fine views back toward the Giant of the Valley and the Keene Pass. The first ten miles of road were excellent. We then crossed a little stream known as Trout Brook, a tributary of the Boquet, and, by a somewhat rough and stony way, began to ascend the high land separating the Boquet from the Au Sable. This ridge includes the 'Poke a Moonshine' Mountain, a rude pile of rocks, burnt over, and with perpendicular precipices of some three or four hundred feet, facing the road which winds along the bottom of the declivity. This cleft thus becomes another 'Pass,' and, with the huge rocks fallen at its base, offers a wild and rather dreary scene. To the north, near the foot of the mountain, are two ponds, Butternut and Auger, which wind fantastically in and out among the hills. As we descended the ridge, we looked toward Canada, far away over rolling plains and hillocks, and soon after reached the sandy stretch of the basin of the Au Sable, in the midst of which is Keeneville, twenty-two miles from Elizabethtown.
By the wayside we passed a solitary grave, the mound and headstone in a patch of corn and potatoes. Was the unknown occupant some dear one whom the dwellers in the humble cabin near by were unwilling to send far away from daily remembrance, or were they too poor to seek the shelter of the common graveyard, or, again, had the buriers of that dead one followed to the 'land of promise,' or departed to some other far country, leaving this grave to the care or rather carelessness of stranger hands, and did the snowy headstone recall no memory of past love to the laborer who ploughed his furrow near that mound, or to the children who played around it?
Ah! thus, not only in the mystical caverns of beauty, poetry, and romance are hidden the graves of buried hopes, but even amid the corn and potatoes of daily life rise the ghostly head and foot stones of aspirations dead and put away out of sight, dead in the body, in daily act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow along his way seeds of beauty not lost upon the thinking beings about him, and bearing fruit perhaps in some future generation. The woman whose reveries have pictured her a Joan of Arc, leading her country's armies to victory, and finally yielding her life in the good cause, may sew for sanitary commissions, and, nursing in some hospital, dropping medicines, making soups and teas, die of some deadly fever, a willing sacrifice to her country.
Later in the day we saw the corn and potatoes growing up to the very verge of an exquisite waterfall, reckless strength and glorious poetry side by side with patient utility and humble prose. This union seemed not strange and unnatural, as did that of the solitary grave with the active labor of supplying the living with daily food, the grave the more lonely that the living with their material wants encircled it so closely.
Keeseville is a manufacturing town, situated upon the Au Sable, which here breaks through a layer of Potsdam sandstone, and presents a series of most interesting and wonderful falls and chasms. About a mile below the village is the first fall of eighty feet. The river has here a large body of water, and falls in fan shape over a rapid descent of steps. It takes a sharp turn, so that without crossing the stream, a fine view can be obtained of the dancing, glittering sheet of foam. About half a mile below is Birmingham, another manufacturing town, which has done its best, but without entire success, to destroy the beauty of the second fall, immediately below the bridge, said bridge being erected upon natural piers at the sides and in the centre of the stream.
Here begins a chasm which continues for the distance of about a mile and a half. Wonderfully grand are these Walled Rocks of the Au Sable, through, which rushes the river, pent up between literally perpendicular walls, a hundred or more feet in height, and from eleven to sixty or eighty feet apart, generally from twelve to fourteen. The water sometimes rushes smoothly and deeply below, and sometimes falls over obstructions, roaring, and tumbling, and foaming. The turns in the river are very sudden, and there are great cracks and gullies extending from top to base, pillars of rock standing alone or leaning against their companions. Occasionally, looking down one of these clefts, one sees nothing but the rock walls with a foaming, rapid rushing below. At one of these most remarkable points, a rude stairway has been constructed, by which the traveller can descend to the bottom, and, standing by the water's edge, look up to the top of this singular chasm. The walls finally lower, and the river flows out into a broad basin, whence it ere long finds its way into Lake Champlain. The banks are wooded with pines, hemlocks, spruce, arbor vitaæ, beech, birch, and basswood, and the ground is covered with ferns, harebells, arbutus, linnæa, mitchella, blue lobelia, and other wild flowers.
There is an excellent inn, the Adirondac House, in Keeseville. Our attentive host told us of Professor Agassiz, and the fiery nature of his speculations regarding the probable history of the sandstone, whose strata, laid as at Trenton Falls, horizontally, layer above layer, add such interest and beauty to the stupendous walls, with their unseen, water-covered depths below, and their graceful wreaths of arbor vittæ nodding and swaying above.
He also told us a tale of the war of 1812, when a bridge, known as the 'High Bridge,' crossed the Au Sable at the narrowest point, some eleven feet in width. A rumor was abroad that the British were about to march up from Plattsburg; whereupon the bridge, consisting of three beams, each nine inches wide, was stripped of its planking. A gentleman had left his home in the morning, and, ignorant of the fate of the bridge, returned quite late at night. Urging his steed forward, it refused to cross the bridge, and not until after repeated castigation would it make the attempt. The crossing was safely accomplished, and the rider suspected nothing amiss until he reached home and was asked how he had come. 'By the High Bridge,' was his reply; whereupon he was informed that the planking had been torn away, and he must have crossed upon a string piece nine inches wide, hanging some hundred feet above the surface of the water. His sensations may be imagined.
A venturesome expedition had also been essayed by our host, in the shape of a voyage down the chasm in a boat. We presume he went at high water, when the rapids would be less dangerous.
Keeseville is only four miles from Port Kent, a steamboat landing on Lake Champlain nearly opposite Burlington, and the Adirondacs may then be approached in several ways. A stage runs three times per week from Keeseville through Elizabethtown and Schroon River to Schroon Lake. North Elba and Lake Placid are some thirty-six miles distant, and may be reached by a good road through the Wilmington Pass. Saranac is somewhat farther, but readily accessible. Strong wagons and good teams are everywhere to be found, and the only recommendation we here think needful to make to the traveller is to have a good umbrella, a thick shawl or overcoat, and as little other baggage as he or she can possibly manage to find sufficient. Trunks are sadly in the way, and carpet bags or valises the best forms for stowage under seats or among feet.
LOIS PEARL BERKELEY
The fiery July noon was blazing over the unsheltered depot platform, where everybody was in the agony of trying to compress half an hour's work into the fifteen minutes' stop of the long express train. The day was so hot that even the group of idlers which usually formed the still life of the picture was out of sight on the shady side of the buildings. Hackmen bustled noisily about; baggage masters were busier and crosser than ever; there was the usual mêlée of leave-takings and greetings. With the choking dust and scalding glare of the sun, the whole scene might have been an anteroom to Tophet.
From the car window, Clement Moore, brown, hollow-cheeked, and clad in army blue, looked out with weary eyes on all the confusion. Half asleep in the parching heat, visions of cool, green forest depths, and endless ripple of leaves, of the ceaseless wash and sway of salt tides, drifted across his brain, and rapt him out of the sick, comfortless present. But they vanished like a flash with the sudden cessation of motion, and the reality of his surroundings came back with a great shock. Captain George, coming in five minutes after with a glass of iced lemonade in one hand and a half dozen letters in the other, found necessary so much of cheer and comfort as lay in—
'Keep courage, Clement, old fellow, it's only a few hours longer now.'
And then he fell to reading his epistles, testifying his disapprobation of their contents presently by sundry grunts, ending finally in a 'Confound it!' given explosively and an explanation:
'Too bad, Moore! Here am I taking you home to get well in peace and quiet, and Ellen has filled the house up with half a dozen girls, more or less. Writes me to come home and be 'made a lion of;' as sensible as most women!' And the grumble subsided. He broke out again shortly: 'Louise Meller—Lois Berkeley—Susy—' the other names were drowned in the rattle of the starting train. The captain finished his letters, and Clement Moore took up his broken dreams, but this time with a new element.
Lois Berkeley. With the name came back a fortnight of the last summer—perfect bright days, far-off skies filled with drifting fleets of sunny vapor, summer green piled deep over the land, the gurgle of falling waters, the shimmer of near grain fields, deep-hued flowers glowing in the garden borders, all the prodigality of splendor that July pours over the world. And floating through these memories, scarce recognized, but giving hue and tone to them like a far-off, half-heard strain of music—a woman's presence. By some fine, subtile harmony, such as spirits recognize, all the summer glow and depth of color, as it came back to him, came only as part of an exquisite clothing and setting for a slender figure and dark face. All the dainty adaptations of nature were but an expression, in a rude, material way, for those elegances and fitnesses which surrounded her, and which were as natural to her very existence as to the birds and flowers. Only a fortnight, and in that fortnight every look and word of hers, every detail of dress, even to the texture of the garments she wore, were indelibly fixed in his memory. She was so daintily neat in everything, nothing soiled or coarse ever came near her. Careless, too, he thought, remembering how, coming through the parlor in the evening dusk, he had entangled himself in the costly crape shawl left trailing across a chair, of the gloves he had picked up fluttering with the leaves on the veranda, and the handkerchiefs always lying about. Perhaps Clement Moore was over critical in his fancies about ladies' dresses, and felt that inner perfect cleanliness and refinement worked itself out in such little matters as the material and color and fit of garments, and all the trifles of the toilet. A soiled or rumpled article of attire showed a dangerous lack of something that should make up the womanly character. He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course to every woman he was thrown in contact with. He had always been disappointed, at first with a feeling of half disgust with himself and others, that his dreams were so different from the reality. It drove him apart from the sex, and gained him the reputation of being shy or ill natured. After finding that disappointments repeated themselves, he accepted them as the natural order of events, let his fancies go as the beau ideal that he was to seek for through life, and became the polished, unimpressible man of society.
But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal. Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming, never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably—does not put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears, waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black, hopeless never drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable because simply a moral obligation.
Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore, being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead, or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new, strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners. He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard of persistent physical action. He was always reading or writing or going somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless journeys. After—as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming—his thoughts were always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any abatement of whatever earnestness was in him.
Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning, unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect action—the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for inaction—he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.
So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness, paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience, George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its associations.
And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day, separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of difference.
A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward him—a dark, unflushed face, with calm, fixed mouth, and clear gray eyes under straight-drawn brows and long, separate, lashes. Fine, lustreless, silky hair was pushed back into a net glittering with shining specks under the narrow-brimmed straw hat. A face full of a waiting look, not hopeful nor expectant, simply unsettled and watchful, yet fresh, and rounded with the dimples and childlike curves of eighteen. Whatever of yearning and unrest the years had brought lingered only about the shadowy eyes and fine mouth. There were no haggard nor worn outlines, and a baby's skin could not have been softer and finer.
At her feet crisped the shining ripples of the incoming tide. Far beyond, calm and burnished, stretched the summer sea into the dreamy distance, where the white noon sky, stricken through with intensest light and heat, dropped down a palpitating arch to meet it. And in all the dazzle of blue and white and silver and bare shining gray, she stood, a straight, slender, haughty little figure, as indefinite of color as all the rest; all but a narrow strip of scarlet at her throat, falling in a flaming line to her waist. The shimmering atmosphere seemed to pant about her; and through the high noon, over the still waters and sleeping shore, hummed the peering strains of a weird little song. She was singing softly:
'For men must work and women must weep,
And the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.'
In the long parlor, the leaf ghosts that had all day long been flitting in, were darkening with the sunset and filling the room with twilight dimness. Deep in a crimson couch and haloed with the last brightness, lay the long, white outlines of a reclining figure. A handful of Japan lilies burned against the pure drapery, and another handful of tea violets lay crushed in the fleecy handkerchief on the floor. Against the cushions the exquisite contour of the sleeping face showed plainly. Coolest quiet sphered the whole figure; not a suggestion of anything but slowest calm grace disturbed its repose. But with the hushing rustle of leaves with the summer murmur flowing in, seemed to come also the deep monotone of the waves, when this inanimate statue was striking out at his side through the rattle and rush of the surf, the wide eyes filled with fierce light, the whole face fixed and stern with the strain of heart muscle, toward the helpless shape shooting out on the undertow. He had not seen her after, and, coming to seek her that night with words of compliment and thanks, he was met by this white vision that had absorbed all the fire and force of the afternoon into its blankness.
A depot platform—long afternoon shadows fell over the pretty country station—standing alone in the woods. The small, temporary bustle about the waiting train was not discordant with the dreamy, restful look of the whole picture. Then the culminating hurry, the shriek and rattle of the starting train—a little figure poising itself for an instant on the car step—a face flushed a little, and dark eyes brightened with a flash of surprised recognition—a quick gesture of greeting and farewell, and then she was gone into the purple shades of evening.
Once again he had seen her, but from afar off, in the glare and heat of a crowded assembly room. The face was a little thinner now, and the eyes were looking farther away than ever. The blood-red light of rubies flashed in the soft lace at her throat and wrists, and dropped in glittering pendants against the slender neck. She was talking evidently of a brilliant bouquet of pomegranates and daphnes that lay in her lap, swinging dreamily the dainty, glittering white fan. And while he looked, she drew away the heavy brocade she wore, from under a careless tread—a slight, slow motion, wholly unlike the careless sweeps of other women. The imperious nature that thrilled her even to the tips of the long fingers, manifested itself, as inborn natures always do, under the deepest disguises, in just this unconscious, most trifling of acts; and, remembering the gesture, he asked, with words far lighter than the tone or feeling:
'As much of a princess as ever?'
And Captain George answered:
'As much of a princess!' both unmindful that no word had been spoken to token who was in the thought of each.
Very trifling things these were to remember. Very likely he had seen scores of far more graceful and memorable scenes; but just these trifles, coming back so vividly, proved to him, as nothing else could have done, with what a keen, intense sympathy every word and look of hers had been noted.
The spoken words roused him. In the ride that followed, twenty different persons and things came into their talk; but never once the princess. That, arousing himself again from his half-dreamful lapse from the old guarded habit, was put away steadily and quietly. His battle had been fought once. He was not to weaken his victory with fancies of the 'might have been.' He had not been tempted, through all these months; he would not tempt himself, now that real trial was so near at hand. Man as he was, if escape had been possible, he would have fled. But there was nothing to do but to go forward, and he called up that old, mighty, intangible safeguard of honor. The matter was settled beyond any question of surprise—he must avoid the long, sapping days of contact, the wasting, feverish yearnings of absence coming after.
Flying over miles and miles of the summer land, heaped with the red tangled sweets of clover fields, belted with white starry mayweed, blue with marshy growth of wild flag, with hazy lines of far-off hills, fading into purple depths of distance, and near low ones lying green and calm close beside them, with brown clear brooks, famous trout streams, after the New England fashion, went running across their way, the old home pride leaped up in George's eyes and voice, and even Moore forgot his weariness, and talked with a flash of the old, careless spirit.
The hack that brought them to their destination left them, deep in the summer night, at the foot of the long avenue of elms—going up which, with slow steps, on a sudden the house broke on them, ablaze with lights, athrob with music, whereat there was a renewal of explosive utterances, and the captain led his friend to the rear of the house to insure a quiet entrance.
From the dark piazza, where he waited while George summoned some one to receive them, he caught, through the long, open casement, the vista of the parlors, with their glitter and confusion of light drapery and glimpses of bright faces and light forms, and softened hum of voices, as the dancers circled with the music. And through it all, straight down toward him, floating in one of the weird Strauss waltzes, came the princess, swathed in something white, airy, wide-falling. The same dark, unflushed face, the same wide, far-looking eyes, and fixed mouth, the same silky falling hair, but cut short now, and floating back as she moved. It was only for a moment: the perfumed darkness that seemed to throb with a sudden life of its own, the great, slow, summer stars above him, the wailing, passionate music that came trembling out among the heavy dew-wet foliage, the dark, calm earth about him, and the light and color and giddy motion that filled the gleaming square before him, struck in on his senses with staggering force; and then she swayed out of his sight, and Mrs. Morris came forward with words of cheer and welcome.