they were its
tutelary divinities, dressing and undressing their green shrines,
robing themselves in jubilant sunshine or in sorrowing clouds, and doing
penance in the snowy shroud of winter, as if they had living hearts
under their rocky ribs and changed their mood like the children of the
soil at their feet, who grow up under their almost parental smiles and
frowns. Happy is the child whose first dreams of heaven are blended
with the evening glories of Mount Holyoke, when the sun is firing its
treetops, and gilding the white walls that mark its one human dwelling!
If the other and the wilder of the two summits has a scowl of terror in
its overhanging brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage
solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet,
companionable village.--And how the mountains love their children! The
sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the first comer in any
port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and show their faces
only in the midst of their own families.

The Mountain which kept watch to the north of Rockland lay waste and
almost inviolate through much of its domain. The catamount still glared
from the branches of its old hemlocks on the lesser beasts that strayed
beneath him. It was not long since a wolf had wandered down, famished in
the winter's dearth, and left a few bones and some tufts of wool of what
had been a lamb in the morning. Nay, there were broad-footed tracks in
the snow only two years previously, which could not be mistaken;--the
black bear alone could have set that plantigrade seal, and little
children must come home early from school and play, for he is an
indiscriminate feeder when he is hungry, and a little child would not
come amiss when other game was wanting.

But these occasional visitors may have been mere wanderers, which,
straying along in the woods by day, and perhaps stalking through the
streets of still villages by night, had worked their way along down from
the ragged mountain-spurs of higher latitudes. The one feature of The
Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its woods was the existence
of the terrible region known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted
by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer venom under our cold
northern sky than the cobra himself in the land of tropical spices and
poisons.

From the earliest settlement of the place, this fact had been, next
to the Indians, the reigning n