hat floated from the wood by day were sometimes
thought to be the spirit of the chief. He had a daughter, Lillinonah,
whose story is related to Lover's Leap, on the riverward side of the
mountain. She had led to the camp a white man, who had been wandering
beside the Housatonic, ill and weak, vainly seeking a way out of the
wilderness, and, in spite of the dark looks that were cast at him and
her, she succeeded in making him, for that summer, a member of the tribe.
As the man grew strong with her care he grew happy and he fell in love.
In the autumn he said to her, "I wish to see my people, and when I have
done so I will come back to you and we shall be man and wife." They
parted regretfully and the winter passed for the girl on leaden feet.
With spring came hope. The trails were open, and daily she watched for
her white lover. The summer came and went, and the autumn was there
again. She had grown pale and sad, and old Waramaug said to young Eagle
Feather, who had looked softly on her for many years, "The girl sickens
in loneliness. You shall wed her." This is repeated to her, and that
evening she slips away to the river, enters a canoe, casts away the
paddle, and drifts down the stream. Slowly, at first, but faster and
faster, as the rapids begin to draw it, skims the boat, but above the
hoarse brawling of the waters she hears a song in a voice that she
knows--the merry troll of a light heart. The branches part at Lover's
Leap and her lover looks down upon her. The joyous glance of recognition
changes to a look of horror, for the boat is caught. The girl rises and
holds her arms toward him in agonized appeal. Life, at any cost! He, with
a cry, leaps into the flood as the canoe is passing. It lurches against a
rock and Lillinonah is thrown out. He reaches her. The falls bellow in
their ears. They take a last embrace, and two lives go out in the growing
darkness.
GOD ON THE MOUNTAINS
From the oldest time men have associated the mountains with visitations
of God. Their height, their vastness, their majesty made them seem worthy
to be stairs by which the Deity might descend to earth, and they stand in
religious and poetic literature to this day as symbols of the largest
mental conceptions. Scriptural history is intimately associated with
them, and the giving of the law on Sinai, amid thunder and darkness, is
one of the most tremendous pictures that imagination can paint. Ararat,
Hermon, Horeb, Pisgah, Calvary, Ad
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