onument Mountain, Massachusetts, on the Wissahickon, near
Philadelphia, Muscatine, Iowa, and Lefferts Height. There are many other
declivities,--also, that are scenes of leaps and adventures, such as the
Fawn's Leap, in Kaaterskill Clove; Rogers's Rock, on Lake George; the
rocks in Long Narrows, on the Juniata, where the ghost of Captain Jack,
"the wild hunter" of colonial days, still ranges; Campbell's Ledge,
Pittston, Pennsylvania, where its name-giver jumped off to escape
Indians; and Peabody's leap, of thirty feet, on Lake Champlain, where Tim
Peabody, a scout, escaped after killing a number of savages.
At Jump Mountain, near Lexington, Virginia, an Indian couple sprang off
because there were insuperable bars to their marriage.
At the rock on the Wissahickon a girl sought death because her lover was
untrue to her.
At Muscatine the cause of a maid's demise and that of her lover was the
severity of her father, who forbade the match because there was no war in
which the young man could prove his courage.
At Lefferts Height a girl stopped her recreant lover as he was on his way
to see her rival, and urging his horse to the edge of the bluff she
leaped with him into the air.
Monument Mountain, a picturesque height in the Berkshires, is faced on
its western side by a tall precipice, from which a girl flung herself
because the laws of her tribe forbade her marriage with a cousin to whom
she had plighted troth. She was buried where her body was found, and each
Indian as he passed the spot laid a stone on her grave--thus, in time,
forming a monument.
"Purgatory," the chasm at Newport, Rhode Island, through which the sea
booms loudly after a storm, was a scene of self-sacrifice to a hopeless
love on the part of an Indian pair in a later century, though there is an
older tradition of the seizure of a guilty squaw, by no less a person
than the devil himself, who flung her from the cliff and dragged her soul
away as it left her body. His hoof-marks were formerly visible on the
rocks.
At Hot Springs, North Carolina, two conspicuous cliffs are pointed out on
the right bank of the French Broad River: Paint Rock--where the
aborigines used to get ochre to smear their faces, and which they
decorated with hieroglyphics--and Lover's Leap. It is claimed that the
latter is the first in this country known to bear this sentimental and
tragically suggestive title. There are two traditions concerning it, one
being that an India
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