Recollections of a Lifetime, by Samuel Griswold Goodrich (New York & Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856)

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LETTER XVIII.

The Ingersolls--Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll--Lieutenant-governor Ingersoll--New Haven Belles--A chivalrous Virginian among the Connecticut D. D.'s--Grace Ingersoll--A New Haven Girl at Napoleon's Court--Real Romance--A Puritan in a Convent.

My dear C******

General King's house stood on the northern slope of a small swell of ground, midway between the two extremities of the main street, and on the western side. It was a rather large two-story edifice, always neatly kept, and glowing in fresh white paint. Wealth and respectability in the full tide of successful experiment, were as readable in its appearance as if it had been so written in front, like the designation of a railway station.

Contiguous to this fresh and flourishing mansion, on the southern side, was a brown, gable-roofed house, with two venerable, but still green and flourishing button-wood trees in front. The building was marked with age, the surface of its clapboards, unprotected by paint, being softened and spongy through the influence of the seasons. The roof was of a yellowish-green tint, imparted by a gathering film of moss. The windows were contracted, and the casing, thin and plain, bespoke the architecture of our day of small things. All around was rather bare, and the little

recess in front, open and uninclosed, was at once shaven close and desecrated by a flock of geese that every night made it their camp-ground. Nevertheless, there was a certain dignity about the button-wood trees in front, and the old brown house in the rear, that excited respect and curiosity in the beholder. There was indeed some reason, for this was the home of the Ingersolls.

The Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll* was my father's immediate predecessor, as minister of the First Congregational Church in Ridgefield. Though he has been dead three fourths of a century, tradition still cherishes his memory as an able preacher, a devoted pastor, and a most amiable man. In my boyhood he had long since passed away, but his widow still lingered in the old brown house I have described. She was every way a superior woman--wise, good, loving, and beloved. Her husband's mantle descended upon her shoulders, and she wore it worthily before the world and the Church. By the latter she was cherished as a guardian saint. She was always my father's friend, and in the critical and difficult passages which are sure to arise between a pastor and his people, she was the ready and efficient peacemaker. I remember her, though faintly and as a dream, yet one in which I saw a pale, gray, saintly old lady, almost too good for this wicked world.

Mr. Ingersoll had a large family, all of whom were of mature age at the period of my childhood. The youngest daughter was wife of Gen. King, and mother of the family I have described. Two of the three sons--Joseph and Morse--were deaf and dumb, and occupied the family mansion: the other son was the late Jonathan Ingersoll, of New Haven, distinguished by his eminent talents and many virtues.

Joseph Ingersoll--according to my recollection--was a plain, solid, dull-looking man, who passed to and fro with rigid directness, never smiling, and seeming to take little interest in what was passing around him. Though naturally quick-minded, and able to express a few ideas by signs, he still seemed to shun intercourse with the world, and even with his friends and neighbors. He and his brother Morse carried on the farm. He rose every day at the same hour; took his meals and retired to bed with the precision of a chronometer. You might safely have set your clock by him. At a particular time in the morning he went to the fields, where he labored with the steadiness of a mill: at a particular time in the afternoon or evening he returned. He revolved through the seasons, performing the labors due to each with the same exactitude. Had he been a machine, wound up and set each day, he could hardly have been more the creature of routine.

Morse Ingersoll was singularly unlike his brother Joseph. While the latter remained a bachelor, the

former was married, and had a family of several children. He was of a sharp, ready mind, social in his disposition, cheerful, witty, and of pleasing personal appearance and address. His whole face beamed with intelligence; his manners bespoke a certain natural refinement, and a quick sensibility to the pleasures of social intercourse. It must be remembered that this was long prior to the modern art of teaching the deaf and dumb; nevertheless, his father had taken great pains with him, and had given him some instruction through the use of signs. By means of these, Morse conversed to a limited extent with his wife and children, and indeed the whole neighborhood. He came frequently to our house, and was a great favorite. I learned to talk with, him a little, and when I met him, he always had something interesting to say. His signs were descriptive, and displayed a turn for humorous associations. Deacon Olmstead was the Big Cane; my father the Bald Pate; Gen. King the Long Sword; Lieut. Smith the See-Saw, and so on. He could write so as to keep accounts, but could not read, and it is probable his range of abstract ideas was narrow. His ready perceptions, however, gave him a large acquaintance with common things. He even seemed to comprehend the outlines of Christianity, and to feel the obligations of conforming to its requisitions. How far he reached into the profounder depths of religion--the mysteries of God and eternity, of man and his vast capacities and ama-

zing destinies, as unfolded by revelation--it is impossible to know. It is related that a deaf and dumb man in France grew up to manhood, and seemed to have a highly religious tendency and experience. He attended the services of the church with steadfast assiduity, and wore a devout and penitential air. No one doubted his comprehension of the groundwork of religion, or the reality of his piety. Afterward, by a surgical operation, he recovered his hearing. It then appeared that he had never conceived the idea of God, a future state, or moral responsibility! His religion was wholly a pantomime. He saw that religious forms and ceremonies were esteemed, and hence he found pleasure in them. He was not a hypocrite, nor an automaton, but a simple exemplification of that mimetic aptitude which is a part of our nature. How large a part of the religion of the world is no better than this, it is not for us to say.

It is probable that Morse Ingersoll had passed beyond this state of living death: no doubt he comprehended--faintly, at least--the idea of a God and human accountability; it is even supposed that he conceived the triune existence of the Deity. He certainly understood something of astronomy, and the nature of the heavenly bodies. Knowing so much, how must he have yearned to know more! How must bis active, earnest mind have struggled within its prison, and sought to solve a thousand mysteries which haunted and perplexed it! "What

a world of thought and knowledge would have been opened to him by the gift of speech, and yet-- what unfathomed and unfathomable mysteries would have remained unsolved, still to haunt and perplex him! Within the narrow circle of his observation and experience, he was almost as near the great mysteries hid in the bosom of the Almighty, which come so often and so anxiously to ask a solution, as the profoundest philosopher. I remember once, while traveling with Mr. Webster, to have asked him if he had been able, in any degree, to penetrate the curtain which hangs over the origin of man, of nature, and of God. He replied that the plainest mind could see just as far in that direction as the most acute: the Almighty had shut the door upon these his secrets, and it was vain for us to attempt to open it.

How hard is it to submit to this stern decree! Behind that awful barrier lie those mighty truths which from the beginning have stimulated, yet baffled, human thought and inquiry. No mind can see them, or yet forego them. There is God: there is man's history, man's destiny, written in letters of light! Oh that we could behold and read the amazing revelation! It may not be: the door is closed; we can not force it! The tyrant Death holds the key: he alone has power to open it; and he at last will open it to us all. Till then, patience, hope, submission--these are our only resources.

When I left Ridgefield, the two deaf and dumb

Ingersolls were still living. On my return there, some years after, both were in their graves. If their privileges were less than those of other men, so doubtless was their accountability. Perhaps even the balance of enjoyment in their lives was not much less than it would have been had they possessed their full faculties. With increased gifts come increased temptations. Men of superior endowments too often abuse their privileges, and their lives sink even below the level of ordinary men. Those who are born rich often squander their wealth, and thus the bankrupt is even more wretched than he who was a pauper from the beginning. At all events, I look back upon the somewhat mournful story of these two men with a cheerful conviction that on earth their lives passed tranquilly away, and that hereafter the cloud that shaded their minds will "be removed in such manner and measure as to compensate for the privations they suffered here.

Jonathan Ingersoll, their brother, was an eminent lawyer, and settled at New Haven. Personally, he was erect, slender, and very much like his distinguished son, the present Ralph I. Ingersoll. He was marked by a nervous twitch of the face, which usually signalized itself when he began to address the jury. On these occasions his eyes opened and shut spasmodically; at the same time he drew the corners of his mouth up and down, the whole seeming as if it was his object to set the court in a roar. Sometimes he succeeded, in

spite of all his efforts to the contrary. Indeed, it was impossible for a person on seeing this for the first time, to avoid a smile--perhaps a broad one. It might seem that such a frailty would have been a stumbling-block in his profession; yet it was not so. I suspect, indeed, that his practice as a lawyer was benefited by it--for the world likes an easy handle to a great name, and this is readily supplied by a personal peculiarity. At all events, such was the dignity of his character, the grace of his language, and the perfection of his logic, his law, and his learning, that he stood among the foremost of his profession. He became Lieutenant-governor of the State, a judge of the Supreme Court, and held various other responsible offices.

This gentleman had a large family--sons and daughters: the names of the former are honorably recorded in the official annals of their native State--nay, of the United States. The daughters were distinguished for personal attractions and refined accomplishments. One of them claims a special notice--Grace Ingersoll: how beautiful the name, how suggestive of what she was in mind, in person, in character! I saw her once--but once, and I was then a child--yet her image is as distinct as if I had seen her yesterday.

In my boyhood these New Haven Ingersolls came to Ridgefield occasionally, especially in summer, to visit their relations there. They all seemed to me

like superior beings, especially Mrs. Ingersoll, who was fair and forty about those days. On a certain occasion, Grace, who was a school companion of my elder sister's, came to our house. I imagine she did not see or notice me. Certainly she did not discover in the shy boy in the corner her future biographer. She was tall and slender, yet fully rounded, with rich, dark hair, and large Spanish eyes--now seeming blue and now black, and changing with the objects on which she looked, or the play of emotions within her breast. In complexion she was a brunette, yet with a melting glow in her cheek, as if she had stolen from the sun the generous hues which are reserved for the finest of fruit and flowers. Her beauty was in fact so striking--at once so superb and so conciliating--that I was both awed and fascinated by her. Wherever she went I followed, though keeping at a distance, and never losing sight of her. She spent the afternoon at our house, and then departed, and I saw her no more.

It was not long after this that a Frenchman by the name of Grellet, who had come to America on some important commercial affairs, chanced to be at New York, and there saw Grace Ingersoll. Such beauty as that of the New Haven belle is rare in any country: it is never indigenous in France. Even if such could be born there, the imperious force of conventional manners would have stamped itself upon her, and made her a fashionable lady, at the expense

of that Eve-like beauty and simplicity which characterized her. It is not astonishing, then, that the stranger--accustomed as he was to all the beauty of French, fashionable life--should still have been smitten with this new and startling type of female loveliness.

I may remark, in passing, and as pertinent to nay narrative, that the women of New Haven in these bygone days were famous for their beauty. They may be so yet, but I have not been there--except as a railroad passenger--for years, and can not establish the point by my own direct testimony. As to the olden time, however, I can verify my statements from the evidence of my own eyes, as well as the records of long tradition. Among the legends I have heard on this subject is one to this effect. There was once a certain Major L....--a Virginian--who I believe was at one time a member of Congress. He was a federalist; and when I saw him at Washington, about the year 1820, he wore a thick queue, and a good sprinkling of hair-powder--then generally esteemed very undemocratic. He was a large and handsome man, and at the period of which I speak was some fifty years of age. But being a Virginian, and withal a bachelor, he was still highly chivalrous in his feelings and conduct toward the fair sex.

Now, once upon a time this handsome old bachelor paid a visit to New England. Having stayed a while

at Boston, he journeyed homeward till he came to New Haven. It chanced to be Commencement-day--the great jubilee of the city--while he was there. Having no acquaintances, he set out in the morning to go and see the ceremonies. Directed by the current of people to the chapel, he went thither, and asked for admittance. It was the custom first to receive the reverend clergy and the ladies, who had privileged seats reserved for them--the world at large being kept out till these were accommodated: a fact which shows that our Puritan ancestors, if they did not hold women to be divine, placed them on the same level as divines. The doorkeeper scanned Major L.... as he came up to the place, and observing him to be a good-looking gentleman in black, with a tinge of powder on his coat-collar, set him down as a minister of the Gospel, and so let him pass. The sexton, within took him in charge, and placed him in the clerical quarter between two old D. D.'s-- Dr. Perkins, of West Hartford, and Dr. Marsh, of Wethersfield, each having the Five Points sticking out--the one from his gray locks and the other from his frizzed wig--as plainly as if they had been emblazoned on a banner.

The major, with the conscious ease of his genial nature and southern breeding, took his seat and surveyed the scene. His gaze soon fell upon a battery of eyes--beautiful, yet dangerous--that ran along the gallery. Unconscious of the sanctity and saintliness

of his position, he half rose and made a low and gracious bow to the ladies above, as if to challenge their whole artillery. Every eye in the house was thus drawn toward him. Before he had time to compose himself, Miss F....., one of the belles of the day, came down the broad aisle, full upon him! He had never seen any thing so marvellously beautiful--at once so simple and so superb, so much a woman and so much a divinity. He held his breath till she had passed, when he turned suddenly to Rev. Dr. Marsh, and giving him a slap on his shoulder--which dislodged a shower of powder from his wig--exclaimed, "By all the gods, sir, there is Venus herself!"

It is not easy to conceive of the consternation of all around, and especially of the reverend clergy. Their grizzled hair stood out, as if participating in the general horror. What could possess their reverend brother? Was he suddenly beset by the Evil One, thus to utter the unhallowed name of Venus in the house of God? It was indeed a mystery. Gradually, and one by one, they left the infected pew, and Major L...., finding himself alone, quietly pocketed the joke, which, however, he often repeated to his friends after his return to Virginia.

This legend refers to a date some dozen years subsequent to the era of Grace Ingersoll, and which therefore shows that the traditional beauty of the New Haven ladies had not then declined. I now return to my story. From the first view of that fair lady,

M. Grellet was a doomed man. Familiar with the brilliant court of the Parisian capital, he might have passed by unharmed, even by one as fair as our heroine, had it not been for that simplicity, that Puritanism of look and manner, which belonged to the social climate in which she was brought up--so strongly in contrast to the prescribed pattern graces of a French lady. He came, he saw, he was conquered. Being made captive, he had no other way than to capitulate. He was a man of good family, a fine scholar, and a finished gentleman. He made due and honorable proposals, and was accepted--though on the part of the parents with many misgivings. Marriage ensued, and the happy pair departed for France.

This took place in 1806. M. Grellet held a high social position, and on his arrival at Paris, it was a matter of propriety that his bride should be presented at court. Napoleon was then in the full flush of his imperial glory. It must have been with some palpitations of heart that the New Haven girl--scarcely turned of eighteen years, and new to the great world--prepared to be introduced to the glittering circle of the Tuileries, and under the eye of the emperor himself. As she was presented to him, in the midst of a dazzling throng, blazing with orders and diamonds, she was a little agitated, and her foot was entangled for a moment in her long train--then an indispensable part of the court costume. Napo-

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Madame Grellet (Grace Ingersoll) at the Court of Napoleon Vol. 1, p. 260.

leon, who, with all his greatness, never rose to the dignity of a gentleman, said in her hearing, "Voilá de la gaucherie americaine!" American awkwardness! Perhaps a certain tinge of political bitterness mingled in the speech, for Jerome had been seduced into marriage by the beauty of an American lady, greatly to the chagrin of his aspiring and unprincipled brother. At all events, though he saw the blush his rudeness had created, a malicious smile played upon his lips, indicative of that contempt of the feelings of women, which was one of his characteristics.*

Madame Grellet, however, survived the shock of this discourtesy, which signalized her entry into fashionable life. She soon became a celebrity in the court circles, and always maintained pre-eminence, alike for beauty of person, grace of manners, and delicacy and dignity of character. More than once she had her revenge upon the emperor, when in the center of an admiring circle, he, with others, paid homage to her fascinations. Yet this transplantation of the fair Puritan, even to the Paradise of fashion, was not healthful.

M. Grellet became one of Bonaparte's receivers-general, and took up his residence in the department of the Dordogne--though spending the winters in. Paris.

Upon the fall of Napoleon, he lost his office, but was reappointed during the "hundred days," only to lose it, again upon the final restoration of Louis XVIII. The shadows now gathered thick and dark around him. His wife having taken a violent cold was attacked with pleurisy, which resulted in a gradual decline. Gently but surely her life faded away. Death loves a shining mark, and at the early age of five-and-twenty she descended to the tomb. With two lovely daughters--the remembrances of his love and his affliction--M. Grellet returned to the south of France, and in the course of years, he too was numbered with the dead.

Almost half a century passed away, and the memory of Grace Ingersoll had long been obliterated from my mind, when it was accidentally recalled. One evening, being at the Tuileries--among the celebrities of the world's most brilliant court--I saw her brother, R. I. Ingersoll. It was curious to meet here with one to whom I had not spoken--though I had occasionally seen him--since we were boys together in Ridgefield. The last incident associated with him in my memory was that we played mumbletepeg together on the green mound, beneath the old Ingersoll buttonwoods. He was now the American Ambassador to Russia, and on his way thither, and I was a chance sojourner in Paris.

We met as if we were old friends. At length I recollected his sister Grace, and asked if her children

were living. He replied in the affirmative, and that he was on the point of paying them a visit. I saw him a month afterward, and he told me that he had just returned from the south of France, where he had enjoyed a most interesting stay of a fortnight with his nieces. One--the elder--was married, and had children around her. She was the wife of an eminent physician, and in easy circumstances--occupying a good social position. She was a charming person, and, as he thought, possessed something of the appearance and character of his lost sister. He found that she could sing the simple Connecticut ballads--taught her in childhood, perhaps in the cradle--by her mother: she had also some of her sketches in pencil, and other personal mementoes, which she cherished as sacred relics of her parent, who now seemed a saint in her memory. How beautiful and how touching are such remembrances--flowers that cast perfume around the very precincts of the tomb!

The other niece--where was she? In a convent, lost to the world--devoted to God--if indeed to extinguish the lights of life be devotion to Him who gave them! By special favor, however, she was permitted to leave her seclusion for a short period, that she might see her uncle. She came to the house of her sister, and remained there several days. She was a most interesting person, delicate, graceful, sensitive, still alive to all human affections. She was generally cheerful, and entered with a ready

heart into the pleasures of home and friends around her. I shall venture to quote a single passage from a letter on this subject, addressed to me by her uncle. Speaking of his visit above alluded to, he says:

"One day, after we had been talking as usual of America and her American relations, she excused herself to me for a short time, that she might go to her room and write a letter to the convent. She was gone from me much longer than I had expected, and on her return I said to her:

"'You must have been writing a long letter, if I may judge by the time you have been about it?'

"'Yes,' was her reply; 'but I have not been writing all the while; I have been praying.'

"'Indeed! Do you pray often?'

"'Yes--and even more often here than when I am at the convent.'

"'Why so?'

"'I fear, my dear uncle, that my affection for you will attach me too much to earth.'"

How strange, how affecting are the vicissitudes of life, as we read them in the intimate personal histories of homes and hearts! The immediate grandchildren of the Puritan minister of Ridgefield--the one a mother, blending her name, her lineage, and her language, in the annals of a foreign land; the other, a devotee, seeking in the seclusion, of her cell--and perhaps not altogether in vain--"that peace which the world can not give!"

LETTER XIX.

Mat Olmstead, the Town Wit--The Salamander Hat--The Great Eclipse--Sharp Logic--Lieutenant Smith, the Town Philosopher--The Purchase of Louisiana--Lewis and Clarke's Exploring Expedition--The Great Meteor--Hamilton and Burr--The Leopard and the Chesapeake--Fulton's Steamboats--Granther Baldwlm, the Village Miser--Sarah Bishop, the Hermitess.

My dear C******

Matthew Olmstead, or Mat Olmstead, as he was usually called, was a day laborer, and though his speciality was the laying of stone fences, he was equally adroit at hoeing corn, mowing, and farm-work in general. He was rather short and thick-set, with a long nose, a little bulbous in his latter days--with a ruddy complexion, and a mouth shutting like a pair of nippers--the lips having an oblique dip to the left, giving a keen and mischievous expression to his face, qualified, however, by more of mirth than malice. This feature was indicative of his mind and character, for he was sharp in speech, and affected a crisp, biting brevity, called dry wit. He had also a turn for practical jokes, and a great many of these were told of him, to which, perhaps, he had no historical claim. The following is one of them, and is illustrative of liis manner, even if it originated elsewhere.

On a cold stormy day in December--as I received the tale--a man chanced to come into the bar-room

of Keeler's tavern, where Mat Olmstead and several of his companions were lounging. The stranger had on a new hat of the latest fashion, and still shining with the gloss of the iron. He seemed conscious of his dignity, and carried his head in such a manner as to invite attention to it. Mat's knowing eye immediately detected the weakness of the stranger; so he approached him, and said--

"What a very nice hat you've got on. Pray who made it?"

"Oh, it came from New York," was the reply.

"Well, let me take it," said Mat.

The stranger took it off his head, gingerly, and handed it to him.

"It is a wonderful nice hat," said Matthew; "and I see it's a real salamander!"

"Salamander?" said the other. "What's that?"

"Why a real salamander hat won't burn!"

"No? I never heard of that before: I don't believe it's one of that kind."

"Sartain sure; I'll bet you a mug of flip of it."

"Well, I'll stand you!"

"Done: now I'll just put it under the fore-stick?"

It being thus arranged, Mat put the hat under the fore-stick into a glowing mass of coals. In an instant it took fire, collapsed, and rolled into a black, crumpled mass of cinders.

"I du declare," said Mat Olmstead, affecting great

astonishment--"it ain't a salamander hat arter all. Well; I'll pay the flip!"

Yet wit is not always wisdom. Keen as this man was as to things immediately before him, he was of narrow understanding. He seemed not to possess the faculty of reasoning beyond his senses. He never would admit that the sun was fixed, and that the world turned round. In an argument upon this point before an audience of his class, he would have floored Sir John Herschel or Lord Rosse by his homely but pointed ridicule.

I remember that when the great solar eclipse of 1806 was approaching, he with two other men were at work in one of our fields, not far from the house. [note] The eclipse was to begin at ten or eleven o'clock, and my father sent an invitation to the workmen to come up and observe it through some pieces of smoked glass. They came, though Mat ridiculed the idea of an eclipse--not but the thing might happen--but it was idle to suppose it could be foretold. While they were waiting and watching for the great event, my father explained that the light of the sun upon the earth was to be interrupted by the intrusion of the moon, and that this was to produce a transient night upon the scene around us.

Mat laughed with that low scoffing chuckle, with which a woodchuck, safe in his rocky den, replies to the bark of a besieging dog.

"So you don't believe this?" said my father.

"No," said Mat, snaking his head, and bringing his lips obliquely together, like the blades of a pair of shears, "I don't believe a word of it. You say, Parson Goodrich, that the sun is fixed, and don't move?"

"Yes, I say so."

"Well: didn't you preach last Sunday out of the 10th chapter of Joshua?"

"Yes."

"And didn't you tell us that Joshua commanded the sun and moon to stand still?"

"Yes."

"Well: what was the use of telling the sun to stand still if it never moved?"

This was a dead shot, especially at a parson, and in the presence of an audience inclined, from the fellowship of ignorance, to receive the argument. Being thus successful, Mat went on.

"Now, Parson Goodrich, let's try it agin. If you turn a thing that's got water in it bottom up, the water'll run out, won't it?"

"No doubt."

"If the world turns round, then, your well will be turned bottom up, and the water'll run out!"

At this point my father applied his eye to the sun through a piece of smoked glass. The eclipse had begun; a small piece was evidently cut off from the rim. My father stated the fact, and the company around looked through the glass and saw that it was so. Mat Olmstead, however, sturdily refused to try it,

and bore on his face an air of supreme contempt, as much as to say, "You don't humbug me!"

But ignorance and denial of the works of God do not interrupt their march. By slow and invisible degrees, a shade crept over the landscape. There was no cloud in the sky, but a chill stole through the atmosphere, and a strange dimness fell over the world. It was midday, yet it seemed like the approach of night. There was something fearful in this, as if the sun was about to be blotted out in the midst of his glory--the light of the world to be extinguished at the moment of its noon! All nature seemed chilled and awed by the strange phenomenon. The birds, with startled looks and ominous notes, left their busy cares and gathered in the thick branches of the trees, where they seemed to hold counsel one with another. The hens, with slow and hesitating steps, set their faces toward their roosts. One old hen, with a brood of chickens, walked along with a tall, halting tread, and sought shelter upon the barn-floor, where she gathered her young ones under her wings, continuing to make a low sound, as if saying--"Hush, my babes, lie still and slumber." At the same time, like many a mother before her, while seeking to bring peace to her offspring, her own heart was agitated with profound anxiety.

I well remember this phenomenon*--the first of the

kind I had ever witnessed. Its sublimity absorbed my whole faculties: it seemed to me the veritable, visible work of the Almighty. The ordinary course of nature was, indeed, equally stupendous; but this incident, from its mere novelty, was a startling and impressive display of the mighty mechanism of the skies. Yet, though thus occupied by this seeming conflict of the heavenly bodies, I recollect to have paid some attention to the effect of the scene upon others. Mat Olmstead said not a word; the other workmen were overwhelmed with emotions of awe.

At length the eclipse began to pass away, and nature slowly returned to her equanimity. The birds came forth, and sang a jubilee, as if relieved from some impending calamity. The hum of life again filled the air; the old hen with her brood gayly resumed her rambles, and made the leaves and gravel

fly with her invigorated scratchings. The workmen, too, having taken a glass of grog, returned thoughtfully to their labors.

"After all," said one of the men, as they passed along to the field, "I guess the parson was right about the sun and the moon."

"Well, perhaps he was," said Mat; "but then Joshua was wrong."

Notwithstanding this man's habitual incredulity, he had still his weak side, for he was a firm believer in ghosts--not ghosts in general, but two that he had seen himself. Like most other ghost-seers, he patronized none but his own. These were of enormous size, white and winged like angels. He had seen them one dark night as he was going to his house--a little brown tenement, situated on a lonesome lane that diverged to the left from the high-road to Salem. It was very late, and Mat'had spent the evening at the tavern, like Tam O'Shanter; like him, he "was na fou, but just had plenty"--a circumstance, I must say, rather uncommon with him, for he was by no means a tippler, beyond the habits of that day. It is probable that all modern ghosts are revealed only to the second-sight of alcohol, insanity, or the vapors; even in this case of Mat Olmstead's, it turned out that his two angels were a couple of white geese, whom he had startled into flight, as he stumbled upon them quietly snoozing in the joint of a rail fence!

It has often appeared to me that Mat Olmstead was

a type--a representative of a class of men not very rare in this world of ours. It is not at all uncommon to find people, and those who are called strong-minded, who are habitual unbelievers in things possible and probable--nay, in things well established by testimony--while they readily become the dupes of the most absurd illusions and impositions. Dr. Johnson, it is stated, did not believe in the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, until six months after it had happened, while he readily accepted the egregious deception of the Cock Lane Ghost. In our day we see people--and sharp ones too--who reject the plainest teachings of common sense, sanctioned by the good and wise of centuries, and follow with implicit faith some goose of the imagination, like Joe Smith or Brigham Young. These are Mat Olmsteads, a little intoxicated by their own imaginations, and in their night of ignorance and folly, they fall down and worship the grossest and goosiest of illusions.

I now turn to a different character, Lieutenant, or as we all called him, Leftenant Smith. He has been already introduced to you, but a few touches are still necessary to complete his portrait. He was a man of extensive reading, and large information. He was also some sixty years old, and had stored in his memory the results of his own observation and experience. He read the newspapers, and conversed with travelers--thus keeping up with the march of events. He affected philosophy, and deemed himself the great

intelligencer of the town. If he was thus rich in lore, he dearly loved to dispense it, asking only in return attentive listeners. He liked discussion, provided it was all left to himself. He was equal to all questions: with, my father, he dilated upon such high matters as the Purchase of Louisiana; Lewis and Clarke's Exploring Expedition; the death of Hamilton in the duel with Aaron Burr; the attack of the Leopard on the Chesapeake;* Fulton's attempts at steam navigation, and the other agitating topics of

those times, as they came one after another. He was profound upon the sources of the Nile and the Niger, learned upon the site of Eldorado, and magniloquent upon Napoleon, then making the whole earth resound with his ominous march toward universal dominion. To a humble auditory of men and boys, gathered by chance--as on a wet day, or a Saturday afternoon, in the stoop of Keeler's tavern--he told about Putnam and the wolf, General Stark and his wife Molly, with variations of Washington and the war.

I have an impression that Lieut. Smith, after all, was not very profound; but to me he was a miracle of learning. I listened to his discussions with very little interest, but his narratives engaged my whole attention. These were always descriptive of actual events, for he would have disdained fiction: from them I derived a satisfaction that I never found in fables. The travels of Mungo Park, his strange adventures and melancholy death--which about those days transpired through the newspapers, and all of which Lieutenant

Smith had at his tongue's end--excited my interest and my imagination even beyond the romances of Sinbad the Sailor and Robinson Crusoe.

In the year 1807, an event occurred, not only startling in itself, but giving exercise to all the philosophical powers of Lieutenant Smith. On the morning of the 14th of December, about daybreak, I had arisen and was occupied in building a fire, this being my daily duty. Suddenly the room was filled with light, and looking up, I saw through the windows a ball of fire, nearly the size of the moon, passing across the heavens from northwest to southeast. It was at an immense height, and of intense brilliancy. Having passed the zenith, it swiftly descended toward the earth: while still at a great elevation it burst, with three successive explosions, into fiery fragments. The report was like three claps of rattling thunder in quick succession.

My father, who saw the light and heard the sounds, declared it to be a meteor of extraordinary magnitude. It was noticed all over the town, and caused great excitement. On the following day the news came that huge fragments of stone had fallen in the adjacent town of Weston, some eight or ten

miles southeast of Ridgefield. The story spread far and wide, and some of the professors of Yale College came to the place, and examined the fragments of this strange visitor from the skies. It appeared that the people in the neighborhood heard the rushing of the stones through the air, as well as the shock when they struck the earth. One, weighing two hundred pounds, fell on a rock, which it splintered--its huge fragments plowing up the ground around to the extent of a hundred feet. One piece, weighing twenty-five pounds, was taken to New Haven, where it is still to be seen, in the mineralogical cabinet of the college. The professors estimated this meteor* to be half a mile in diameter, and to have traveled through the heavens at the rate of two or three hundred miles a minute.

On this extraordinary occasion the lieutenant came to our house, according to his wont, and for several successive evenings discoursed to us upon the subject. I must endeavor to give you a specimen of his performances.

"It seems to me, sir," said he, addressing my father, "that these meteors, or falling stars, or what not, are very strange things, and have not received due attention from the learned world. They are of great antiquity, sir: their appearance is recorded as far back as 654 B. C.. One is spoken of by the elder Pliny, sir, which fell near the town of Gallipoli, in Asia Minor, about 405 B. C. This was to be seen in Pliny's time--that is, five hundred years afterward, and was then as big as a wagon, sir. From these remote dates down to the present time, these wonderful phenomena have occurred at intervals, so that two hundred instances are on record. It is probable that many more have passed unnoticed by man, either in the night, or in remote places, or in the vast oceans which cover two thirds of the earth's surface. In general, sir, these meteors send down showers of stones, of various sizes. Some of the fragments are no bigger than a pea; others are of greater magnitude--in one instance weighing twenty-five thousand pounds.

"Well, sir, this subject becomes one of importance, and the inquiry as to what these strange things are, demands attention of the philosopher. I have studied the subject profoundly; I have looked into the various theories, and am by no means satisfied with any of them, sir. Some suppose these meteors to be cast out of the volcanic craters of the moon, but that supposition I deem incompatible with Scripture, and the general aspect of the universe. The Bible represents

nature as harmonious: it speaks of the morning stars as singing together. It is impious, then, to suppose that the moon, a mere satellite of the earth, can be in a state of rebellion, and discharging its destructive batteries upon the earth, its lord and master. Besides, the moon thus constantly firing at the earth would, in the course of time, be all shot away."

"That is," said my father, "it would get out of ammunition, as the Americans did at Bunker Hill?"

"Just so, sir: therefore I look upon these as crude opinions, arising from a superficial view of the universe. I have examined the subject, sir, and am inclined to the opinion that these phenomena are animals revolving in the orbits of space between the heavenly bodies. Occasionally, one of them comes too near the earth, and rushing through our atmosphere with immense velocity, takes fire and explodes!"

"This is rather a new theory, is it not?" said my father. "It appears that these meteoric stones, in whatever country they fall, are composed of the same ingredients--mostly silex, iron, and nickel: these substances would make rather a hard character, if endowed with animal life, and especially with the capacity of rushing through space at the rate of two or three hundred miles a minute, and then exploding?"

"These substances I consider only as the shell of the animal, sir."

"You regard the creature as a huge shell-fish, then?"

"Not necessarily a fish, for a whole order of nature, called Crustacea, has the bones on the outside. In this case of meteors, I suppose them to be covered with some softer substance, for it frequently happens that a jelly-like matter comes down with meteoric stones. This resembles coagulated blood; and thus; what is called bloody rain or snow, has often fallen over great spaces of country. Now, when the chemists analyze these things--the stones, which I consider the bones, and the jelly, which I consider the fat, and the rain, which I consider the blood--they find them all to consist of the same elements--that is, silex, iron, nickel, &c. None but my animal theory will harmonize all these phenomena, sir."

"But," interposed my father, "consider the enormous size of your aerial monsters. I recollect to have read only a short time since, that in the year 1803, about one o'clock in the afternoon, the inhabitants of several towns of Normandy, in France, heard noises in the sky, like the peals of cannon and musketry, with a long-continued roll of drums. Looking upward, they saw something like a small cloud at an immense elevation, which soon seemed to explode, sending its vapor in all directions. At last a hissing noise was heard, and then stones fell, spreading over a country three miles wide by eight miles long. No less than two thousand pieces were collected, weighing from one ounce to seventeen pounds. That must

have been rather a large animal--eight miles long and three miles wide!"

"What is that, sir, in comparison with the earth, which Kepler, the greatest philosopher that ever lived, conceived to be a huge beast?"

"Yes; but did he prove it?"

"He gave good reasons for it. He found very striking analogies between the earth and animal existences: such as the tides, indicating its breathing through vast internal lungs; earthquakes, resembling eructations from the stomach; and volcanoes, suggestive of boils, pimples, and other cutaneous eruptions."

"I think I have seen your theory set to verse."

Saying this, my father rose, and bringing a book, read as follows:

"To me things are not as to vulgar eyes--
I would all nature's works anatomize:
This world a living monster seems to me,
Rolling and sporting in the aerial sea:
The soil encompasses her rocks and stones,
As flesh in animals encircles bones.
I see vast ocean, like a heart in play,
Pant systole and diastole every day,
And by unnumber'd venus streams supplied,
Up her broad rivers force the aerial tide.
The world's great lungs, monsoons and trade-winds show--
From east to west, from west to east they blow:
The hills are pimples, which earth's face defile,
And burning Etna an eruptive boil.
On her high mountains living forests grow,
And downy grass o'erspreads the vales below:

From her vast body perspirations rise,
Condense in clouds and float beneath the skies."*

My father having closed the book, the profound lieutenant, who did not conceive it possible that a thing so serious could be made the subject of a joke, said:

"A happy illustration of my philosophy, sir, though I can not commend the form in which it is put. If a man has any thing worth saying, sir, he should use prose. Poetry is only proper when one wishes to embellish folly, or dignify trifles. In this case it is otherwise, I admit; and I am happy to find so powerful a supporter of my animal theory of meteors. I shall consider the subject, and present it for the consideration of the philosophic world."

One prominent characteristic of this our Ridgefield philosopher was, that when a great event came about, he fancied that he had foreseen and predicted it from the beginning. Now about this time Fulton actually' succeeded in his long-sought application of steam to

navigation. The general opinion of the country had been, all along, that he was a monomaniac, attempting an impossibility. He was the standing theme of cheap newspaper wit, and the general God-send of orators, who were hard run for a joke. Lieutenant Smith, who was only an echo of what passed around him, during the period of Fulton's labors, participated in the current contempt; but when the news came, in October, 1807, that he had actually succeeded--that one of his boats had walked the waters like a thing of life, at the rate of five miles an hour, against the current of the Hudson river--then, still an echo of the public voice--did he greatly jubilate.

"I told you so: I told you so!" was his first exclamation, as he entered the house, swelling with the account.

""Well, and what is it?" said my father.

"Fulton has made his boat go, sir! I told you how it would be, sir. It opens a new era in the history of navigation. We shall go to Europe in ten days, sir!"

Now you will readily understand, that in these sketches I do not pretend to report with literal precision the profound discourses of our Ridgefield savant; I remember only the general outlines, the rest being easily suggested. My desire is to present the portrait of one of the notables of our village--one whom I remember with pleasure, and whom I conceive to be a representative of the amiable, and per-

haps useful race of fussy philosophers to be found in most country villages. He was, in fact, a sort of Yankee Pickwick, full of knowledge, and a yearning desire to make everybody share in his learning. As was proper, he was a prophet, an "I -TOLD-YOU-SO!" who foresees every thing after it has happened. Unlike Mat Olmstead, who believed too little, perhaps he believed too much: for whatever he saw in print, he considered as proved. If he ever doubted any thing, it was when he had not been the first to reveal it to the village. Yet whatever his foibles, I was certainly indebted to him for many hours of amusement, and no doubt for a great deal of information.

From the town oracle, I turn to the town miser. Granther Baldwin, as I remember him, was threescore years and ten--perhaps a little more. He was a man of middle size, but thin, wiry, and bloodless, and having his body bent forward at a sharp angle with his hips, while his head was thrown back over his shoulders--giving his person the general form of a reversed letter 2. His complexion was brown and stony; his eye gray and twinkling, with a nose and chin almost meeting like a pair of forceps. His hair--standing out with an irritable frizz--was of a rusty gray. He was always restless, and walked and rode with a sort of haggish rapidity. At church, he wriggled in his seat, tasted fennel, and bobbed his head up and down and around. He could not afford tobacco, so he chewed, with a constant activity, either an oak chip or the

roots of elecampane, which was indigenous in the lane near his house. On Sundays he was decent in his attire, but on week-days he was a beggarly curiosity. It was said that he once exchanged hats with a scarecrow, and cheated scandalously in the bargain. His boots--a withered wreck of an old pair of white-tops--dangled over his shrunken calves, and a coat in tatters fluttered from his body. He rode a switch-tailed, ambling mare, which always went like the wind, shaking the old gentleman merrily from right to left, and making his bones, boots, and rags rustle like his own bush-harrow. Familiar as he was, the school-boys were never tired of him, and when he passed, "There goes Granther Baldwin!" was the invariable ejaculation.

I must add--in order to complete the picture--that in contrast to his elvish leanness and wizard activity, his wife was bloated with fat, and either from indolence or lethargy, dozed away half her life in the chimney corner. It was said, and no doubt truly, that she often went to sleep at the table, sometimes allowing a rind of bacon to stick out of her mouth till her nap was over. I have a faint notion of having seen this myself. She spent a large part of her life in cheating her husband out of fourpence-ha'pennies* of which more than a peck were found secreted in an old chest, at her death.

It was the boast of this man that he had risen from poverty to wealth, and he loved to describe the process of his advancement. He always worked in the corn-field till it was so dark that he could see his hoe strike fire. When in the heat of summer he was obliged occasionally to let his cattle breathe, he sat on a sharp stone, lest he should rest too long. He paid half a dollar to the parson for marrying him, which he always regretted, as one of his neighbors got the job done for a pint of mustard-seed. On fast-days, he made his cattle go without food as well as himself. He systematically stooped to save a crooked pin or a rusty nail, as it would cost more to make it than to pick it up. Such were his boasts--or at least, such were the things traditionally imputed to him.

He was withal a man of keen faculties; sagacious in the purchase of land, as well as in the rotation of crops. He was literally honest, and never cheated any one out of a farthing, according to his arithmetic--though he had sometimes an odd way of reckoning. It is said that in his day--the Connecticut age of blue--the statute imposed a fine of one dollar for profane swearing. During this period, Granther Baldwin employed a carpenter who was somewhat notoriously addicted to this vice. Granther kept a strict account of every instance of transgression, and when the job

was done, and the time came to settle the account, he said to the carpenter--

"You've worked with me thirty days, I think, Mr. Kellogg?"

"Yes, Granther," was the reply.

"At a dollar a day, that makes thirty dollars, I think?"

"Yes, Granther."

"Mr. Kellogg, I am sorry to observe that you have a very bad habit of taking the Lord's name in vain."

"Yes, Granther."

"Well, you know that's agin the law."

"Yes, Granther."

"And there's a fine of one dollar for each offense."

"Yes, Granther."

""Well--here's the account I've kept, and I find you've broken the law twenty-five times; that is, sixteen times in April, and nine in May. At a dollar a time, that makes twenty-five dollars, don't it?"

"Yes, Granther."

"So then, twenty-five from thirty leaves five; it appears, therefore, that there is a balance of five dollars due to you. How'll you take it, Mr. Kellogg? In cash, or in my way;--say in 'taters, pork, and other things?"

At this point, the carpenter's brow lowered, but with a prodigious effort at composure, he replied--

"Well, Granther, you may keep the five dollars,

and I'll take it out in my way, that is, in swearing!" Upon this he hurled at the old gentleman a volley of oaths, quite too numerous and too profane to repeat.

Now I do not vouch for the precise accuracy of this story in its application to Granther Baldwin. I only say it was one of the things laid to him. A man of marked character is very apt to be saddled with all the floating tales that might suit him. I remember once to have told a well-authenticated story of Ethan Allen, when Dr. L..., a German professor, being present, laughed outright, saying, "I have heard my father tell the same story of old Baron Von Skippenhutten, and declare that he was present when the thing happened!"

I need not enlarge upon the adventures between Granther Baldwin and the school-boys, who took delight in pocketing his apples, pears, and nuts. These things were so abundant in those days, that everybody picked and ate, without the idea of trespass. But Granther's heart was sorely afflicted at these dispensations. He could not bear the idea of losing a pocketful of apples, or a handful of butternuts, chestnuts, or walnuts, even if they lay decaying in heaps upon his grounds. As I have said, his house and farm were close by West Lane school, and it was quite a matter of course that his hard, unrelenting conservatism should clash with the ideas of the natural rights of schoolboys, entertained by such

free-born youths as those at this seminary. They loved the fruit, and considered liberal pickings to be their birthright. Had the old gentleman let them alone, or had he smiled on them in their small pilferings, they had, no doubt, been moderate in their plunder. But when he made war on them--even unto sticks, stones, and pitchforks--the love of fun and the glory of mischief added an indescribable relish to their forays upon his woods and orchards. I confess to have been drawn in more than once to these misdoings. Perhaps, too, I was sometimes a leader in them. I confess, with all due contrition, that when the old miser, hearing the walnuts rattle down by the bushel in the forest back of his house--knowing that mischief was in the wind--came forth in a fury, pitchfork in hand; when I have heard his hoarse yet impotent threats; I have rather enjoyed than sympathized with his agonies. Poor old gentleman--let me now expiate my sins by doing justice to his memory!

It is true he was a miser--selfish and mean by nature. Born in poverty, and only rising from this condition by threescore years and ten of toil and parsimony, was it possible for him to be otherwise? What a burden of sin and misery is often laid upon a single soul! And yet Granther Baldwin was not wholly lost. He professed religion, and the New Man wrestled bravely with the Old Man. The latter got the better too often, no doubt; for avarice once lodged

in the soul is usually the last vice that capitulates to Christianity. It so readily assumes the guise of respectable virtues--frugality, providence, industry, prudence, economy--that it easily dupes the heart that gives it shelter.

And besides, religion in its sterner exercises forbids the pleasures of life, in which mankind generally content the universal craving for excitement. The moral constitution of man--the mind and the heart--have their hunger and their thirst as well as the body. These can not be annihilated: if they are not appeased in one way, they will be in another. Old Burton says they are like badgers: if you stop up one hole, they will dig out at another. And thus, if a man is too rigid in his creed to allow the genial excitements of society, he is very likely to satisfy himself with something worse. He generally resorts to secret indulgences of some kind, and thus lays the axe at the root of all religion, by establishing a system of hypocrisy. To a man thus situated, the respectable vice of avarice is commended, for while, as I have said, it takes the guise of various virtues, it furnishes gratification to the desire of excitement by its accumulations, its growing heaps of gold, its enlarging boundaries of land, its spreading network of bonds and mortgages, its web of debt woven at the rate of compound interest over the bodies and souls of men--debtors, borrowers, speculators, and other worshipers of Mammon.

-----

The Hermitess. Vol. 1, p. 291.

It is so easy therefore to be misled by this demon of avarice, that I shall deal gently with it in Granther Baldwin's case, seeing that he had so many temptations in his nature and his position. Nevertheless, I am bound to say that it so dried up the fountains of his heart as to render him absolutely insensible even to the idea of personal appearance--as if God gave man his own image to wear a scarecrow's hat, and boots that a beggar would despise. But for his avarice, he might have discovered that want of decency is want of sense; but for his avarice, his heart might have been the sun of a system, circling around the fireside and diffusing its blessings over each member of the family; but for his avarice, he might, being rich, and increased in goods, have even enlarged his heart, and been the benefactor of the neighborhood.

Still, I shall not parade these sins before you: let me rather speak of the old man's virtues. He was a firm believer in the Bible, and set the example of implicit submission to its doctrines, as he discovered them. He made an open profession of his faith, and in sickness and in health, in rain and shine, in summer and winter, he sustained the established institutions of religion. No weather ever prevented him from attending church, though he lived nearly two miles from the place of worship. Often have I seen him on a Sunday morning, facing the keen blast, plodding his way thither, when it seemed as if his

heart must be reduced to an icicle. He attended all funerals within the precincts of the place. He was present at every town meeting: he paid his taxes, civil and ecclesiastical, at the appointed day. He kept thanksgivings and fasts--the first gingerly, and the last with all his heart. He had a clock and a noon-mark, and when, they varied, he insisted that the sun was wrong. He believed profoundly in arithmetic, and submitted, without repining, to its decrees. Here was the skeleton of a man and a Christian; all that it wanted was a soul!

One sketch more, and my gallery of eccentricities is finished. Men hermits have been frequently heard of, but a woman hermit is of rare occurrence. Nevertheless, Ridgefield could boast of one of these among its curiosities. Sarah Bishop was, at the period of my boyhood, a thin, ghostly old woman, bent and wrinkled, but still possessing a good deal of activity. She lived in a cave, formed by nature, in a mass of projecting rocks that overhung a deep valley or gorge in West Mountain. This was about four miles from our house, and was, I believe, actually within the limits of North Salem; but being on the eastern slope of the mountain, it was most easily accessible from Ridgefield, and hence its tenant was called an inhabitant of our town.

This strange woman was no mere amateur recluse. The rock--bare and desolate--was actually her home, except that occasionally she strayed to the neighbor-

ing villages, seldom being absent more than one or two days at a time. She never begged, but received such articles as were given to her. She was of a highly religious turn of mind, and at long intervals came to our church, and partook of the sacrament. She sometimes visited our family--the only one thus favored in the town--and occasionally remained overnight. She never would eat with us at the table, nor engage in general conversation. Upon her early history she was invariably silent; indeed, she spoke of her affairs with great reluctance. She neither seemed to have sympathy for others, nor to ask it in return. If there was any exception, it was only in respect to the religious exercises of the family: she listened intently to the reading of the Bible, and joined with apparent devotion in the morning and evening prayer. I have very often seen this eccentric personage stealing into the church, or moving along the street, or wending her way through lane and footpath up to her mountain home. She always appeared desirous of escaping notice, and though her step was active, she had a gliding, noiseless movement, which seemed to ally her to the spirit-world. In my rambles among the mountains, I have seen her passing through the forest, or sitting silent as a statue upon the prostrate trunk of a tree, or perchance upon a stone or mound, scarcely to be distinguished from the inanimate objects--wood, earth, and rock--around her. She had a sense of propriety as to personal appearance, for

when she visited the town, she was decently, though poorly clad; when alone in the wilderness she seemed little more than a squalid mass of rags. My excursions frequently brought me within the wild precincts of her solitary den. Several times I have paid a visit to the spot, and in two instances found her at home. A place more desolate--in its general outline--more absolutely given up to the wildness of nature, it is impossible to conceive. Her cave was a hollow in the rock, about six feet square. Except a few rags and an old basin, it was without furniture--her bed being the floor of the cave, and her pillow a projecting point of the rock. It was entered by a natural door about three feet wide and four feet high, and was closed in severe weather only by pieces of bark. At a distance of a few feet was a cleft, where she kept a supply of roots and nuts, which she gathered, and the food that was given her. She was reputed to have a secret depository, where she kept a quantity of antique dresses, several of them of rich silks, and apparently suited to fashionable life, though I think this was an exaggeration. At a little distance down the ledge, there was a fine spring of water, in the vicinity of which she was often found in fair weather.

There was no attempt, either in or around the spot, to bestow upon it an air of convenience or comfort. A small space of cleared ground was occupied by a few thriftless peach-trees, and in summer a patch of starveling beans, cucumbers, and potatoes. Up two or

three of the adjacent forest-trees there clambered luxuriant grape-vines, highly productive in their season. With the exception of these feeble marks of cultivation, all was left ghastly and savage as nature made it. The trees, standing upon the tops of the cliff, and exposed to the shock of the tempest, were bent, and stooping toward the valley--their limbs contorted, and their roots clinging, as with an agonizing grasp, into the rifts of the rocks upon which, they stood. Many of them were hoary with age, and hollow with decay; others were stripped of their leaves by the blasts, and others still, grooved and splintered by the lightning. The valley below, enriched with the decay of centuries, and fed with moisture from the surrounding hills, was a wild paradise of towering oaks, and other giants of the vegetable kingdom, with a rank undergrowth of tangled shrubs. In the distance, to the east, the gathered streams spread out into a beautiful expanse of water called Long Pond.

A place at once so secluded and so wild was, of course, the chosen haunt of birds, beasts, and reptiles. The eagle built her nest and reared her young in the clefts of the rocks; foxes found shelter in the caverns, and serpents reveled alike in the dry hollows of the cliffs, and the dank recesses of the valley. The hermitess had made companionship with. these brute tenants of the wood. The birds had become so familiar with her, that they seemed to heed her almost as little as if she had been a stone. The

fox fearlessly pursued his hunt and his gambols in her presence. The rattlesnake hushed his monitory signal as he approached her. Such things, at least, were entertained by the popular belief. It was said, indeed, that she had domesticated a particular rattlesnake, and that he paid her daily visits. She was accustomed--so said the legend--to bring him milk from the villages, which he devoured with great relish. It will not surprise you that a subject like this should have given rise to one of my first poetical efforts--the first verses, in fact, that I ever published. [note] I gave them to Brainard, then editor of the Mirror, at Hartford, and he inserted them, probably about the year 1823. I have not a copy of them, and can only recollect the following stanzas:

For many a year the mountain hag
      Was a theme of village wonder,
For she made her home in the dizzy crag,
      Where the eagle bore his plunder.

Up the beetling cliff she was seen at night
      Like a ghost to glide away;
But she came again with the morning light,
      From the forest wild and gray.

Her face was wrinkled, and passionless seem'd,
      As her bosom, all blasted and dead--
And her colorless eye like an icicle gleam'd,
      Yet no sorrow or sympathy shed.

Her long snowy locks, as the winter drift,
      On the wind were backward cast;
And her shrivel'd form glided by so swift,
      You had said 'twere a ghost that pass'd.

Her house was a cave in a giddy rock, 
      That o'erhung a lonesome vale; 
And 'twas deeply scarr'd by the lightning's shock, 
      And swept by the vengeful gale. 
 
As alone on the cliff she musingly sate-- 
      The fox at her fingers would snap; 
The crow would sit on her snow-white pate, 
      And the rattlesnake coil in her lap. 
 
The night-hawk looked down with a welcome eye, 
      As he stoop'd in his airy swing; 
And the haughty eagle hover'd so nigh, 
      As to fan her long locks with his wing. 
 
But when winter roll'd dark his sullen wave, 
      From the west with gusty shock, 
Old Sarah, deserted, crept cold to her cave, 
      And slept without bed in her rock. 
 
No fire illumined her dismal den, 
      Yet a tatter'd Bible she read; 
For she saw in the dark with a wizard ken, 
      And talk'd with the troubled dead. 
 
And often she mutter'd a foreign name, 
      With curses too fearful to tell, 
And a tale of horror--of madness and shame-- 
      She told to the walls of her cell!

I insert these lines--not as claiming any praise, as rigidly accurate in the delineation of their subject--but as a sketch of the impressions she made upon the public mind, vividly reflected by my own imagination.

The facts in respect to this Nun of the Mountain were indeed strange enough without any embellish-

meuts of fancy. During the winter she was confined for several months to her cell. At that period she lived upon roots and nuts, which she had laid in for the season. She had no fire, and, deserted even by her brute companions, she was absolutely alone, save that she seemed to hold communion with the invisible world. She appeared to have no sense of solitude, no weariness at the slow lapse of days and months: night had no darkness, the tempest no terror, winter no desolation, for her. When spring returned, she came down from her mountain, a mere shadow--each year her form more bent, her limbs more thin and wasted, her hair more blanched, her eye more colorless. At last life seemed ebbing away like the faint light of a lamp, sinking into the socket. The final winter came--it passed, and she was not seen in the villages around. Some of the inhabitants went to the mountain, and found her standing erect, her feet sunk in the frozen marsh of the valley. In this situation, being unable, as it appeared, to extricate herself--alone, yet not alone--she had yielded her breath to Him who gave it!

The early history of this strange personage was involved in some mystery. So much as this, however, was ascertained, that she was of good family, and lived on Long Island. During the Revolutionary war--in one of the numerous forays of the British soldiers--her father's house was burned; and, as if this were not enough, she was made the victim of one of those