mind, when he set forth, not to come back
before he had examined the dreaded ledge. He had half persuaded himself
that it was scientific curiosity. He wished to examine the rocks, to
see what flowers grew there, and perhaps to pick up an adventure in
the zoological line; for he had on a pair of high, stout boots, and he
carried a stick in his hand, which was forked at one extremity, so as to
be very convenient to hold down a crotalus with, if he should happen to
encounter one. He knew the aspect of the ledge from a distance; for its
bald and leprous-looking declivities stood out in their nakedness from
the wooded sides of The Mountain, when this was viewed from certain
points of the village. But the nearer aspect of the blasted region had
something frightful in it. The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had
been gnawed for thousands of years by hungry waves. In some places they
overhung their base so as to look like leaning towers which might topple
over at any minute. In other parts they were scooped into niches or
caverns. Here and there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them
of such width that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of
meeting the regular tenants, who might treat him as an intruder.

Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing but cracks
or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a foot could find
hold. High up on one of these precipitous walls of rock he saw some
tufts of flowers, and knew them at once for the same that he had found
between the leaves of his Virgil. Not there, surely! No woman would have
clung against that steep, rough parapet to gather an idle blossom. And
yet the master looked round everywhere, and even up the side of that
rock, to see if there were no signs of a woman's footstep. He peered
about curiously, as if his eye might fall on some of those fragments of
dress which women leave after them, whenever they run against each other
or against anything else,--in crowded ballrooms, in the brushwood after
picnics, on the fences after rambles, scattered round over every place
which has witnessed an act of violence, where rude hands have been laid
upon them. Nothing--Stop, though, one moment. That stone is smooth and
polished, as if it had been somewhat worn by the pressure of human feet.
There is one twig broken among the stems of that clump of shrubs. He put
his foot upon the stone and took hold of the close-clinging shrub. In
this way he