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BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1895
Copyright, 1895,
BY MARY N. MURFREE.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
The beetling crags that hang here and there above the gorge hold intheir rugged rock sculpture no facial similitudes, no suggestions. Thejagged outlines of shelving bluffs delineate no gigantic profileagainst the sky beyond. One might seek far and near, and scan the vastslope with alert and expectant gaze, and view naught of the semblancethat from time immemorial has given the mountain its name. Yet theimagination needs but scant aid when suddenly the elusive simulacrumis revealed to the eye. In a certain slant of the diurnal light, evenon bright nights at the full of the moon, sometimes in the uncannyelectric flicker smitten from a storm-cloud, a gigantic peakedsinister face is limned on the bare, sandy slope, so definite, withsuch fixity of lineament, that one is amazed that the perception of itcame no earlier, and is startled when it disappears.
Disappearing as completely as a fancy, few there are who have everseen it who have not climbed from the herder's trail across thenarrow wayside stream and up the rugged mountain slopes to the spotwhere it became visible. There disappointment awaits the explorer. Onefinds a bare and sterile space, from which the hardy chickweed canscarcely gain the sustenance for timorous sproutings; a fewoutcropping rocks; a series of transverse gullies here and there,washed down to deep indentations; above the whole a stretch of burnt,broken timber that goes by the name of "fire-scald," and is a relic ofthe fury of the fire which was "set out" in the woods with the missionto burn only the leaves and undergrowth, and which, in itsundisciplined strength, transcended its instructions, as it were, anddestroyed great trees. And this is all. But once more, at a coigne ofvantage on the opposite side of the gorge, and the experience can beutilized in differentiating the elements that go to make up the weirdpresentment of a human countenance. It is the fire-scald that suggeststhe great peaked brown