e and extent of the sudden movement was
ascertained. A great seam had opened above the long cliff, and the
terrible Rattlesnake Ledge, with all its envenomed reptiles, its dark
fissures and black caverns, was buried forever beneath a mighty incumbent
mass of ruin.

CHAPTER XXXI.

MR. SILAS PECKHAM RENDERS HIS ACCOUNT.

The morning rose clear and bright. The long storm was over, and the calm
autumnal sunshine was now to return, with all its infinite repose and
sweetness. With the earliest dawn exploring parties were out in every
direction along the southern slope of The Mountain, tracing the ravages
of the great slide and the track it had followed. It proved to be not so
much a slide as the breaking off and falling of a vast line of cliff,
including the dreaded Ledge. It had folded over like the leaves of a
half-opened book when they close, crushing the trees below, piling its
ruins in a glacis at the foot of what had been the overhanging wall of
the cliff, and filling up that deep cavity above the mansion-house which
bore the ill-omened name of Dead Man's Hollow. This it was which had
saved the Dudley mansion. The falling masses, or huge fragments breaking
off from them, would have swept the house and all around it to
destruction but for this deep shelving dell, into which the stream of
ruin was happily directed. It was, indeed, one of Nature's conservative
revolutions; for the fallen masses made a kind oz shelf, which interposed
a level break between the inclined planes above and below it, so that the
nightmare-fancies of the dwellers in the Dudley mansion, and in many
other residences under the shadow of The Mountain, need not keep them
lying awake hereafter to listen for the snapping of roots and the
splitting of the rocks above them.

Twenty-four hours after the falling of the cliff, it seemed as if it had
happened ages ago. The new fact had fitted itself in with all the old
predictions, forebodings, fears, and acquired the solidarity belonging to
all events which have slipped out of the fingers of Time and dissolved in
the antecedent eternity.

Old Sophy was lying dead in the Dudley mansion. If there were tears shed
for her, they could not be bitter ones; for she had lived out her full
measure of days, and gone--who could help fondly believing it?--to rejoin
her beloved mistress. They made a place for her at the foot of the two
mounds. It was thus she would have chosen to sleep, and not to have