mountain and the town at
its foot, which strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and which
was oftener thought of than spoken of by its inhabitants. Those
high-impending forests,--"hangers," as White of Selborne would have
called them,--sloping far upward and backward into the distance, had
always an air of menace blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as if
some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare,
precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide
like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest chance-support, and, so
sliding, crush the village out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled
over on the valley of Goldau.

Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short residence
in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought of this
awful green wall, piled up into the air over their heads. They would lie
awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffed snapping of roots, as if
a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break away, like
the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were clinging
with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel away and
crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths. And yet, by one of
those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature,
there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years
after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening
mountainside, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls.
The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction. If the
mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they ought
to be there. It was a fascination like that which the rattlesnake is
said to exert.

This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other source
of danger which was an element in the every-day life of the Rockland
people. The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a joke against
them, that a Rocklander could n't hear a beanpod rattle without saying,
"The Lord have mercy on us!" It is very true, that many a nervous old
lady has had a terrible start, caused by some mischievous young rogue's
giving a sudden shake to one of these noisy vegetable products in her
immediate vicinity. Yet, strangely enough, many persons missed the
excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite in other regions, where
there were nothing but black and green and striped snakes