esser 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 nightmare of the inhabitants. It was easy
enough, after a time, to drive away the savages; for "a screeching
Indian Divell," as our fathers called him, could not crawl into the
crack of a rock to escape from his pursuers. But the venomous population
of Rattlesnake Ledge had a Gibraltar for their fortress that might have
defied the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol. In its deep
embrasures and its impregnable casemates they reared their families,
they met in love or wrath, they twined together in family knots, they
hissed defiance in hostile clans, they fed, slept, hybernated, and in
due time died in peace. Many a foray had the town's-people made, and
many a stuffed skin was shown as a trophy,--nay, there were families
where the children's first toy was made from the warning appendage that
once vibrated to the wrath of one of these "cruel serpents." Sometimes
one of them, coaxed out by a warm sun, would writhe himself down the
hillside into the roads, up the walks that led to houses,--worse than
this, into the long grass, where the bare-footed mowers would soon pass
with their swinging scythes,--more rarely into houses,--and on one
memorable occasion, early in the last century, into the meeting-house,
where